Predominantly I have been writing scripts which harvest all sorts of stuff from data local to the office, then attempting to visualize it. The trouble is this is a route to madness! There are so many different ways of seeing data, its like some mad acid trip. I digress…

My current slow burner is visualizing time-scoped changes in a subversion repository as a piece of music. I had originally thought of some ruby kicking out some MIDI in a text file but MIDI looks to be old hat. Over the weekend I bumped into open sound control (OSC) and ChucK. Chuck allows generation of sound and is capable of running an OSC server.

The final piece of the jigsaw (in terms of kick-starting me) was an excellent article linking ruby to OSC and to ChucK. I now have the core technology to go crazy!

Its a fun experience to have code make music and armed with this knowledge (at some point) our subversion repositories will all be making pop-tastic tunes covering the last iteration. I’m going to mix in text to speech to cover keywords such as “crash” (and link to cymbals or similar). Any-way, start small…

No idea when I will complete this (sketching out the basics on paper at the minute), as I now have a mad backlog of personal projects. Decided to start knocking them off one-by-one. I’m finishing the processing based mind map prototype first! Hopefully after a virtual TinyMud party I will start posting on this proper (winter is a good time for code to grow).