short wave radio / Visual Patching

Day 5: Short Wave Radio

“Jean” is used as a image generator. There are layers and blend modes, but no filter chain.

3 layers:

A scrolling background image.
A short bluish vertical line moving left to right and back.
And below a similar line in yellow.

The visible effect is produced by combining the layers. Unlike as in an image processing program, the layers are connected in a cyclical manner. A little bit like an feedback loop. But implemented very simple, by not deleting the OpenGL buffer before drawing the next frame.

I had prepared this animation for a live coding session. But I found it too overwhelming to manipulate parts of the sound and the visuals at the same time while on stage. For sound + visuals, you’d need two people on stage.

Source code: https://gitlab.com/metagrowing/jean/-/tree/main/sketchbook/wop26/5-short-wave-radio?ref_type=heads

Mixing 3 audio recordings from freesound.org and soundcloud.com.

https://freesound.org/people/kwahmah_02/sounds/254521/

Ham radio morse code broadcasts on shortwave radio. The file name tells you the band I recorded it in. Picked up and recorded with Twente university’s online radio receiver.

recorded by kwahmah_02 November 12th, 2014

dkozinn: Just to let you know, this isn’t morse code. It’s RTTY (Radio Teletype), which is a digital form of communications that dates back to the use of mechanical teletypes but today is almost exclusively done completely digitally.

https://freesound.org/people/relwin/sounds/397088/

noaa_oceanweather recorded by: relwin

July 7th, 2017

NOAA Southern California coastal weather report, computerized speech. Good ambiance for shark movies with boats. Captured with SDR# software and RTL DVB dongle.

https://soundcloud.com/user388337858/numbers-station-2014-10-23t04-51-24z-58460khz user388337858 Numbers Station 2014 - 10 - 23T04 - 51 - 24Z 5846.0kHz