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Seeing Sound with Amit Nambiar

Amit Nambiar on July 23, 2020

Hey, I'm Amit! I'm an architect turned computational designer who now helps architects and engineers make buildings faster and better. In this ta...
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Bhumi

This is fascinating. (I'm a fan of making academic definitions real and concrete, with physical experiments)

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Kate Dameron

What a beautiful talk! Thanks @amitlzkpa

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Shareese A

This is incredible!!!! I was just telling my musician friend that coding is in nearly everything! Going to show his students soon!

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Terri Fricker

I'm really looking forward to your talk, Amit. I studied physics and have been thinking about I can add that knowledge to increase my value in the marketplace. All I've really thought about is making animation that obeys physics laws.

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Terri Fricker

oops. This was for the next talk.

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Terri Fricker

I'm really looking forward to your talk, Amit. I studied physics and have been thinking about I can add that knowledge to increase my value in the marketplace. All I've really thought about is making animation that obeys physics laws.

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Amit Nambiar

That's awesome!
Please do share if you have any thoughts!

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Adnan Mostafa • Edited

@dev it seems many parts of this video has been replaced by Vadehi's talk on Cost of Data!

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Daniel Brady

pinging @andy because I know he was helping out with tech issues for the conference today 🙏

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Kathleen Burkhardt

Great talk! Did you end up doing the FFT on a server side or on the JS client?

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Amit Nambiar

FFT happens on the client side.
The WebAudioAPI actually does it and is pretty straightforward to work with.

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Kathleen Burkhardt

That’s so cool! :)

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Chase Nickels

That is absolutely beautiful to hear and see. What frequencies have you found to be the most fascinating to work with and have you subjected these visuals to binaural beats at all?

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Amit Nambiar

I'm still figuring the range that I like to work with most. So far my understanding is that the actually frequency range shouldn't matter too much for what I create. Sort of like which colors are used isn't the only thing that makes a painting good/bad. That said I know people (me included) do have a preference for colour choices. So my hunch is that it'll be an open question forever.

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Amit Nambiar

Also I'm remapping the range to make it perceptible for us humans in 3d space. The frequency spectrum sits well on a logarithmic scale which becomes too difficult to visualise in a 3D space designed for people.
So there's always that bit of distortion in effect.

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MREves

It might just be me but can I just say how beautiful I thought the forms were at each of the frequencies in the example provided during the talk.

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Terri Fricker

What an exciting way to "see" sound.

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Lee

So very cool!

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Terri Fricker

They are so beautiful.

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Bryant Richards

If you could suspend particles in the air could you apply this technology to create a visual representation of prayer chants that a person could sit inside of?

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Amit Nambiar

Yeah. That's sort of what I was going for.
The real world unfortunately has forces of gravity which makes it difficult to recreate :(

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Cheray

Mindblown

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Cheray

I just bought a book called The Jazz of Physics. Seems to have a similar theme.

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Amit Nambiar

Just checking that out. Seem neat!
Would like to see how different genres "look" like one day.

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Angel Young

That is really cool! <3

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teapuddles

What an amazing talk! Thanks so much for sharing. I'm really interested in Web Audio and MIR in general. What's the best way to get started with the Web Audio API? It's so vast!

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Amit Nambiar

Can't quite profess to be an expert on this.
But visualizing the spectrogram might the best way to get started and get a sense of how it works.
After that you could in whichever direction interests you.
Besides visualizing, you could also procedurally create sound/music. So it's pretty broad in what you can do with it.

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teapuddles

Thanks for the tip! I'll look deeper into that and see where the tools take me!

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Vikram Babu

these visualizations makes me think of the show devs! beautiful.

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Terri Fricker

I love how it starts out looking like a galaxy of stars, then the interference makes it change into patterns. The temple audio was beautiful.

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Fernando

Amazing talk, the visualizations are beautiful thank you for sharing this Amit!

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Sharetta Martin

Amazing presentation Amit! Thanks for helping us "see" sound!

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Amanda Gonzalez

I'm in total awe!!! This is so cool!

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Amanda Gonzalez

Literally mind blown!! This is beautiful!!!