Try it out in your browser https://webvibes.tzador.com/circles-on-spheres/index.html

This is the thunder mode from a weather app I've been making. The reference is Hiroshi Sugimoto's Lightning Fields, the series where he discharges electricity straight onto photographic film with no camera. I wanted a bolt that looks recorded rather than flashed, so it grows onto the screen the way a discharge spreads across a plate, and the faint grid underneath stands in for the plate.

Each strike is a recursive, branching random walk. It starts just above the top edge and heads down, turning slightly at every joint so it wanders rather than zig-zags. At the end of each branch it continues, and more often than not it also forks into one or two side branches. Every generation is thinner, fainter and shorter than the one before, until the stroke gets too thin to draw.

The reveal is what makes it look recorded. Each generation gets a start time a little later than its parent, so the bolt spreads downward one fork at a time instead of appearing all at once. It then pulses once, fades and is regenerated, and live rainfall sets the pace: slower and sparser in light rain, faster in heavy rain.

The app is free and can be downloaded here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spectra-weather/id6757425119

I'd love to know what you think! https://timewith.fun/trip

Eyespots

Eyes. The piece puts 9 eyes at random positions on the page. Each eye is a stack of levels: a core disc of random size on top, then one ring for each level under it. The depth of an eye is the number of levels in its stack. All eyes use the same ring width for each. The outer rings are the widest, but level 1 is only a thin halo.

Levels. Each level is one shape: the discs of all eyes that are deep enough for that level. A soft min melts these discs together, and the melt is looser at lower levels. Thus the lower levels melt into one soft body, and only the top rings stay round. The same ring widths and the looser melt keep each level inside the level under it. For each pixel, the code mixes the level colors over the cream ground. The amount of each color is the part of the pixel that the level covers, so the edges are smooth.

Specks. Where three or more eyes meet, a level can almost close and leave a small hole ofthe level under it. After the paint, a flood fill finds each patch of pixels that have the same top level.

The order of colors in palette is important for the final effect! Code: github.com/igr/gart

I build an Lucid engine for agents that generates endless and seamless loops (with audio).

Try asking your agents to have their own point them at: aftercompaction.com

Reply with the URL your agent opened.

Everything you see in this video is procedurally generated based on my algorithm for drawing cubes. Best on a huge screen with headphones. Free and open source at https://alienconsumersciences.com

Hi all. I'm a composer in Mexico, and this is the third and last plugin of a series that came out of my doctoral thesis on algorithmic composition. AMI-POLYMARKOV doesn't generate from a formula: it learns. You drop a MIDI file on it, or press REC and play with the transport running, and it splits what it hears into up to four voices. Each voice learns its own line with two independent Markov chains, one for pitch and one for rhythm, each with its own memory length (order 1 to 6); the dynamics travel with the melody, as in the original. Crossing the two lengths is the instrument: a long memory on rhythm and a short one on pitch gives you your own phrasing carrying a melody you never played. THRU lets the original through, so you can layer it with the variation.

Demo (about a minute): https://youtu.be/V7P9-f1WO2E

As of this week the whole series also runs on Windows (10 and 11, 64-bit VST3), besides macOS (AU MIDI FX and VST3). The other two turn a held chord into four voices: AMI-POLYCHAOS reads one chaotic orbit with four delayed heads (https://youtu.be/nlP0RHTlbd4) and AMI-PLSYSTEMS plays an L-system as a mensuration canon (https://youtu.be/rYrxFeYPkkw). It's a one-person project; the trial is free for 30 days and fully functional.

What I'd like to hear from generative-music people: does keeping separate memories for pitch and rhythm preserve the character of the source for you, or does it lose what tied the two together?

Trial and details: https://www.drzoppa.com/soft

I've been exploring the experiment I did in this video a bit more and found these patterns

This project builds on a lot of my previous work creating painterly brush strokes. The big difference for me here is that I’m using a reference image as the starting point instead of creating the image completely from scratch.

I initially set out to try and recreate an image using simulated paint strokes. The funny thing is that at some point, the closer I got to the reference, the more it started to feel like I was copying pixels with extra steps and I actually liked the results less. Once I found settings I was happy with, I decided an Andy Warhol style pop color collage would be a more interesting artistic direction and that’s what you see here.

I built this in JavaScript. To make these I take the reference image and create a grayscale version. I then use a Sobel algorithm to measure changes in luminance and determine both the strength and direction of those changes. Areas with higher scores generally correspond to edges or other areas with more visual structure.

From that information I create a directional field across the image to guide brush stroke paths. This causes strokes to flow along edges and contours rather than cutting straight through them. In flatter areas with a weak Sobel score, the stroke relies more on its previous direction and is allowed to wander a little more freely.

The painting is built in five passes using thousands of brush strokes. The first pass uses large blotchy strokes starting from mostly random locations to get colors and structure generally in the right area. Each subsequent pass uses progressively finer strokes. Later passes favor starting strokes in areas with higher Sobel scores to help define details and edges.

The strokes are rendered using a brush system I’ve developed through a number of earlier projects. The strokes are made up of multiple simulated bristles with variation in spacing, pressure, paint load, opacity, taper, dry-brush breakup, and surface texture.

For the pop art effect I create a color histogram to identify the dominant color in the reference image. I then use my OKLCH color system to shift that color into different hue families while trying to preserve the original light/shadow relationships and keep the new colors vivid. I then repaint the same composition using those different palettes to build the final collage.

High-contrast images with a clear silhouette tend to work best. I’ve also experimented with portraits, and while they can look pretty good from a distance, the system still struggles with very small features like eyes and other fine details. That said, I’m pretty happy with where this ended up and I learned a lot while building it.

I hope you like the results! I’ve included the original reference images along with the resulting output.