Category Archives: Art

Art

Talking Heads: Speech Visualizations of the Past and Present

January 1, 2012 – 9:11 pm

Last year I became interested in the possibility of comparing different politicians and public figures through computer assisted analysis of their speeches. Starting with archival videos of famous addresses, I created a small program that scans the volume level of the audio track and takes snapshots of the speakers at his/her loudest (i.e. most emphatic) moments. It then combines these snapshots into a single composite photo. The resultant images reveal otherwise hidden facial features and patterns of body language. When viewed in series they allow us to compare speakers within a much more controlled set of parameters than if we were simply to watch these videos side by side.

Last April I was fortunate enough to be invited to give a talk on this project at the Critical Themes in Media Studies conference in New York City. Unfortunately I never got around to creating a real post about the piece, however renewed interest in the topic has driven me to fix this. Below you will find image and sound examples taken from the talk. If you’re interested in using this program for your own work, the code can be found here. Over the next few weeks my close friend YuanYi Fan will be using the software to analyze candidates in the upcoming Taiwanese Presidential Election, so links will surely follow.

More examples and the code itself can be found on the Full Project Page

Benito Mussolini

[audio:/old/sound/musso.mp3|titles=Benito]

Adolf Hitler

[audio:/old/sound/hitler.mp3|titles=adolf]

Dr. Martin Luther King jr.

[audio:/old/sound/luther.mp3|titles=luther]
[audio:/old/sound/luther2.mp3|titles=luther 2]

FDR

[audio:/old/sound/fdr.mp3|titles=fdr]

JFK

LBJ

Richard Nixon

Gerald Ford

Jimmy Carter

Ronald Reagan

[audio:/old/sound/reagan.mp3|titles=reagan]

George H. W. Bush

[audio:/old/sound/hw.mp3|titles=h-dubya]

Bill Clinton

George W. Bush

[audio:/old/sound/bush.mp3|titles=bush]

Barack Obama

[audio:/old/sound/obama.mp3|titles=obama]

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Art

Pop Montage

March 23, 2011 – 8:17 pm

Every day google’s hot trends website releases statistics on the 20 most quickly rising search queries. I wrote a program that downloads this information and collects pictures of each of these items, analyzes the images, crops them based on their content, and finally arranges them into a single visual composition, leaving us with a giant daily collage.

It’s sort of a way to take a snapshot of what society cares about at a particular moment in time. When viewed in sequence, it also allows you to pick out patterns in popular culture. As you can probably guess it’s pretty bleak. Basically every day there’s inevitably a new food or type of desert, a celebrity controversy, some random sexy girl of the day, a few sports players, more celebrities, something cute like “national margarita day”, and then maybe, MAYBE toward the bottom of the list something serious like a massacre in Georgia or the Defense of Marriage Act. Hopefully I’ll be able to set this up on a server so that it automatically makes a new collage every 24 hours. People could use it as a homepage to very quickly find out what’s new in the world without having to scan the news.

Image analysis, manipulation, and montage is done in Matlab. Statistical information is taken from Google Hot Trends.

March 2, 2011:

Feb. 26, 2011:

March 1, 2011:

For more examples, check out the full project page.

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