ShredBoard is an instrument that uses the conventional keyboard and mouse as input. The keys z-/, a-’, q-] and 1-= are mapped to the notes of four guitar strings starting at E, A, D, G for each row of keys. The mouse is mapped for use as an effects pedal. There are 2 effects – ChillZoid – a clean, ambient effect and MightySTOMP – a distorted synth effect. Parameters for each effect can be adjusted with 3 knobs to produce a variety of tones.

The software is an AIR application written in ActionScript 3. The sounds are produced in  SuperCollider by sending OSC messages via  flosc. The flosc AS3 classes were modified for certain OSC messages to work correctly with SuperCollider.

Role: Software Engineer
Client: Aviary
Team: Aviary
Technology: ActionScript, Flash, Flex

During my time at Aviary, I was responsible for maintaining and developing a number of new features for Aviary’s online audio production app Myna (a DAW) and Roc (a sequencer). The apps were built with Flash, Flex and ActionScript.

The New York Times Newswire API is used to load news for the last 24 hours. The title and URL for the retrieved articles are used to search for tweets with the BackTweets API, a BackType service.

The articles are placed around the center arranged clockwise based on the time they were published. The tweets for each article emanate from the article near the center to the outside. These are based on the time difference between when the article was published and when it was tweeted. The 24 rings indicate the hour difference from 1 near the center to 24 near the outside.

This project was built with ActionScript 3, PHP, MySQL, XML. The data was harvested using the NY Timeswire API and backtweets API.

Data was collected between November 13, 2009 and February 9, 2010 via a cron job set up to pull and store the data locally. The current database is 107 MB, with 15,327 NYTimes articles and 311,885 tweets for those articles.

Source on github.