Alwin de Rooij | Portfolio

Referring to Hermann Hesse’s book “The Glass Bead Game” in which the glass bead game is closely related to music making we wanted to built a glass beat game in which a player or a group of players can make music by putting marbles on a game board. The idea includes building an instrument for simple music making as well as exploring the possibilities of using the setup as a game with rules focusing on topics like sound, music, spatialization, hearing, psychology, tactical behavior and synesthesia.

For more info go here!

The project “Inter-Voice Morphing using a neural network based dimensionality reduction technique” is created in collaboration with Tommaso Villanova. In this project we have attempted to set up the first experiments for a novel way to generate and morph voice sounds. In this project we use a special case of a feedforward neural network and train it using a large phoneme dataset. The idea is to encode the phoneme data in the neural network and extract its minimal amount of principal components. After training the neural network is used to construct a synthesizer for voice (phoneme) sounds.

For more information about the preliminary tests go here!

Finished this project about a month ago. Its about retrieving scenes (scenic pictures) from a database using visual information retrieval techniques only. You can just give the program an image you found or took and then the program will try to find similar pictures. The retrieval part uses a variety of techniques and concepts like the perceptually uniform CIE L*A*B* colour space, the Self Organizing Map (Kohonen Neural Networks) and Sobel Edge detection.

For more info, go here!

On march 7th 2008 (23:00) I will participate in the “Suite Interfacing” night at the Schonberg Zaal in the Royal Conservatory in The Hague together with Louis Marlon and Eric Parren. Our performance Quad Interface Performance #2 deals with popular performance practices, alternative musical interfaces and poise.

Entrance is free.

Website

Together with the AR+RFID team from the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague we created an augmented reality environment for the Todays Art festival 2007. Here’s some media & info:

http://www.kabk.nl/lab/news_10.html

http://www.kabk.nl/lab/

In close collaboration with Maurice Kraanen we developed a realtime spatio-temporal imaging technique based on slit-scanning. Slit-scanning is well known for being used in 2001: A Space odyssey. Also several artworks have been created using this technology. Our algorithm takes the basic concept of slit-scanning and applies it directly on different colour protocols creating a digital Time Prism.

More info

My research project Genetic Wave Shaping (GWS) is now online and finished. GWS is an algorithm I developed based on the concept of Evolutionary Computation and proposes a solution and natural tool for the difficulties in generating large amounts of user specified timbre characteristics in synthesized sound. Although the project needs further development to optimize efficiency and usability the results are promising. GWS proves to be a potential helpful tool for such tasks.

Online Documentation & Paper

In a collaboration project with Yerry Ydema for the Robotics class we’ve build an insectoid autonomous robot inspired by the concepts of Rodney Brooks’s Subsumption Architecture and Mark Tilden’s Biomorphic Robotics.

Mathilda#1 currently has 3 modes :

1. Walk in a straight line.
2. Stand still and await the next state.
3. exploring behaviour/ random walk.

Watch video

Some media about the “Structet: Building music 2006″ project, Todays Art 2006:

Small movie excerpt

Pictures

Structet is a temporary electronic music impovisation ensemble consisting of visual musicians and sound artists.