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I Am David Sparkle – Jaded Afghan from eduardo omine on Vimeo.

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After watching Moscow Olympics’ Second Trace video, Errol from KittyWu Records invited me to make a video for Singaporean band I Am David Sparkle.

Jaded Afghan is one of the best tracks on their 2007 album This Is The New and also a song well suited to my beat detection algorithm (based on this gamedev.net article — look for “frequency selected sound energy algorithm #2”).

Inspired by this thread (especially comments from Chris O’Shea and Dave Bollinger), this Processing sketch has two modes: capture and render. In capture mode, there’s audio playback, FFT analysis and beat detection — the resulting data is saved to a text file. In render mode, there’s no audio: all data is retrieved from the text file and PNG still frames are rendered. It took approximately 1h30 to render the 6779 frames for this video, at 800×450 pixels, 24FPS. The movie file with audio was assembled in Adobe Premiere.

It’s highly recommended to download the original 170MB Quicktime file — the link is at the bottom of the page, below “Statistics”. A Vimeo account is required, but it’s free.

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Libraries and code snippets used in this project:

• geomutils by Karsten Schmidt
• _gl.pde from Robert Hodgin
• Minim by Damien Di Fede
• mouseWheel.pde by Marius Watz
• OCD by Kristian Damkjer
• Traer Physics by Jeffrey Traer