Beat Detection Algorithm and Dancing Sphere

[Jussi]

I wrote a basic beat detection algorithm for R4. You can copy-paste it to your custom scene and it will (try to) identify beats, breaks and beat length for you. For more information on how to use and configure it, see BeatDetection Copy paste.r4 in predefie\Beat Detection algorithm directory.
You can find the packet here:



Just extract it to your R4 root directory and it should work (if I didn't forget anything).

Included to Beat_Detection_and_Dancing_Sphere.zip:
- Beat Illustration.r4 - a scene that illustrates the internal beat detection variables
- Plasma Sphere Dance Show.r4 - A scene that utilizes the algorithm. The scene consists of a watermorph dancing on a flowfield. She's a poor dancer but looks nice, if you ask me!
- Textures and a water morph file
It will also create a subdirectory called 'Beat Detection algorithm' to the predefine directory. There you can find Beat Illustration.r4 and BeatDetection Copy paste.r4.

[rabidhamster]

That is very cool!
If you don't mind i'll see if I can compile it into the next R4 release. It works really well.

For a dancer there will need to be some filtering to keep the dancer running smoothly, but that should be pretty easy.

thanks,
- Gordon

[Jussi]

I'm not sure what you mean, but feel free to do what ever you want to. Do you want to compile the beat detection into a module?

Neither am I sure what you mean with filtering the dancer. Should her position be filtered? Or the layer where it is drawn?
I also had a problem with the dancer's outer layer flickering, but I failed to do anything about it. It may, of course, be caused by my crappy Radeon 9600XT.

[rabidhamster]

I meant re-write it in C++, and have it setup the variable 'soundpos'. I haven't yet looked at your code, so I'm not sure why it would be flickering...

In your sound graph, you have a sawtooth, but the height of it varies. To do a proper 3D dancer, I need a value that goes between 0 and 1 - always (it will be used to blend between states, if its not the same each time the dancer will suddenly change position and it'll look really odd).

- Gordon

[Rovastar]

Nothing happens for months in this forum and I go offline for a few weeks and it all happens at once.

To make matters worse I cannot look at this atm in R4.

Anyway I see you based on the long standing code by good old Krash one of my fellow MilkDrop scene authors.

I was looking in MilKDrop to improve Krashs code by adding a fps rate with to improve the detection but it had mixed results on the tests I did many moons ago.

[Jussi]

I also tried to make beat detection for MilkDrop some time ago. However, the problem with MD is that only bass, mid and treb variables are available and only the custom waves can access the frequency data. The bass variabale includes all too high frequencies to be used for working bass detection.

I was disturbed by the thought that MD presets cannot really do sophisticated music interaction. I found it somewhat meaningless to do real-time reactive music visualizations if you cannot tell the difference to an offline-rendered visualization. The idea of being real-time is that you can interact with the music, real-time.

In R4, frequency data is available and a working beat detection can be implemented.

[rabidhamster]

[Guest]

[Jussi]

[rabidhamster]

[andff]

[Jussi]