Prototyping 2013-10-07 (Networked Media)

This page is currently being worked on.

Bit

Binary & Digital Audio Basics
(ASCII to sound... what does this entail?)
http://zacharydenton.com/generate-audio-with-python/

Notation and Representation
possible tools to employ: audacity, sox, midge, puredata and python of course
Example: Description of a folder

What is a bit?

A little seque into the Binary...

Bit shift

The simple act of opening an audio file in a text editor (or the reverse of opening a text as a digital audio) raises many questions. What exactly is a digital representation of a text, or a sound. The fact that once digital, bits can be as easily interpreted as text or as sound, or image, or other kind of data is at once fascinating, but also deceptively reinforces an idea of multimedia as inherantly bridging and mixing together media. Media formats, and their underlying digital representations, are highly specialized codes (algorithmic, legal) involved in the related processes of encoding and decoding.

A bit shift is the process by which the bits of some data value are shifted in position either "left" or "right" (that is away from or towards the "least significant" bit position). In a simple numerical representation of integers such a shift corresponds to multiplication and division by a power of two. This as a result of the design and working of the system of binary representation, with each column defined to represent powers of 2. The same operation performed on the characters of a text represented as ASCII code values would produce a much different result as the system of representation is structured very differently (with groupings of characters organized not so much by numeric relations, but by clusters of associated symbols and the conventions of the alphabet).

Raw Media

BMP + WAV

In-class exercise

Select either to work with Image or Sound.

Use (nested) loops in Python to produce beautiful digital media exploring the bit-friendly nature of Rotterdam.

Resources

10 print book on early BASIC home computer programming culture