Looking for a post on Metafilter, probably from around 2000 or so, about a guy who wrote a piece of software to slice up video in real time to make songs

May 11, 2009 2:49 PM

Looking for a post on Metafilter, probably from around 2000 or so, about a guy who wrote a piece of software to slice up video in real time to make songs

I've tried a lot of search terms with no real luck. Basically you'd feed it a bunch of video clips, and then in real time you'd say or sing something into a mic, and after a sec it would show you a series of cut-up video clips that sort of mimiced what you said. There was a video (videos) of it being demonstrated and I think also footage of the creator at a conference. I sort of vaguely remember it having "hacks" or something like that in the name. It's driving me nuts!

posted by RustyBrooks to MetaFilter-related at 2:49 PM (15 comments total)

Scrambled Hackz, perhaps?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:57 PM on May 11

Yes I think that's it!
posted by RustyBrooks at 3:14 PM on May 11

Yes!!!

I've been looking for this for ages and ages, to the point where I was about to make an AskMe about it (I'd forgotten where I saw it.)

Thanks, Metafilter!
posted by dunkadunc at 3:16 PM on May 11

If anyone gets ahold of the software, please consider sharing that info here. I'd like to try it out but I haven't seen anything published, yet.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:17 PM on May 11

The funny thing is, if this was just posted in 2006, then I have like a false memory of it, because I "remember" watching this in my office in california, which would have been impossible after 2002
posted by RustyBrooks at 3:23 PM on May 11

Basically I tried (and failed) to describe it to someone today, so I tried for like 2 hours to hunt the video down
posted by RustyBrooks at 3:25 PM on May 11

BP - "The core analysis / database software was written in C++ and Python. The interface to the database and a/v playback was realized using Pure Data.

The whole package will be released under the GNU GPL as soon as I find time to clean up that mess / comment the code / document it and find a way to make it easily installable. Thanks for your patience."
posted by gman at 3:39 PM on May 11

I think, but am not positive, that this was the same announcement as in 2006. (Sadly.) I saw vvvv, but I'm not really a Windows guy. I wonder if I could do something with a Monome controller, OSC and some Core Animation libraries?
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 3:42 PM on May 11

Just FYI and I'll say upfront I worked quite a lot on this, you can do very similar stuff with the open existing source python Echo Nest Remix API. It handles all of the audio onset and segment and beat/bar extraction from audio, is what powers things like morecowbell.dj, PUT A DONK ON IT and others....

While it does not cut up video for you it does a very good job at matching two audio streams on their segment level and it's pretty trivial to match frames of a video based on its audio against another audio file. See the "afromb" example in the remix source, and some videos we made with it: Cat Plays Piano, Fred McDowell vs. Little Kid, more at myxdup, etc etc. Let me know if you have any questions....
posted by brianwhitman at 6:36 PM on May 11 [2 favorites]

At the time, that video from three years ago had a distinctly vaporware feel to me. I hate to say it, but I have to: I don't really believe the guy really put together any actual software for this. Not that this would all be completely impossible, but it would seem either impractical enough or pointless enough for it to be a somewhat odd idea.

I still get the same vibe. Hate to say it, but I do. And I get the feeling that I'd rather build my own program that does this and play with it.
posted by koeselitz at 11:05 PM on May 11

Maybe it's just the odd sensation of hearing a guy say, in effect, 'yeah, I really like open-source, and I am a huge supporter of the GPL, and I'll show you the source code of this project I'm working on... er... later....'
posted by koeselitz at 11:08 PM on May 11

dunno, koeselitz, that didn't strike me as odd at all. Lots of people develop something to the point of making an impressive demo, and they kind of intend to "clean it up" for release, but it's really hacky and ugly right now, and they intend to get around to releasing it any day now, but they really have no motivation to do more work on the project because they've already got the cool demo payoff. Software maintenance is rarely the fun part.
posted by hattifattener at 11:15 PM on May 11

Yeah, but if you get far enough to 'demo' a product, why the hell not just release the source and let other people work on it? I mean, if you're so pro-open-source and all. Feeling like you have to 'clean up' code in order to release the source and let other people hack through it doesn't really make much sense. Isn't the point of bazaar-style open source development that you release the source code before a product is useful—before it's even worth a demo—and let the commmunity run with it?

Maybe he just forgot. I don't know. Or maybe he was self-conscious about what he was doing; that would make sense, considering the Augustine-esque 'we want to make it GPL; but not today, Lord, not today."
posted by koeselitz at 1:23 AM on May 12

RustyBrooksPoster: "The funny thing is, if this was just posted in 2006, then I have like a false memory of it, because I "remember" watching this in my office in california, which would have been impossible after 2002"

Nah, you just sampled the memory, compared it with a similar one in your memory cloud, and so on.

Thanks for recalling this; it reminds me of how John Oswald sometimes sounds to me.
posted by not_on_display at 4:39 AM on May 12

koeselitz - Releasing it before it's useful at all sounds like burning a bridge - some people who might find it interesting find out instead of doing one small tweak & getting to see what that does, there's a lot more work to get to that point. They make a mental note to check on it much later & then forget about it.

It's easier to fix this small annoyance than this large thing that's not moving anyway.

Though yeah, I have code I should post, & I'm uncomfortably aware of how I hacked it together.
posted by Pronoiac at 12:29 PM on May 12