Brendan Dawes
The Art of Form and Code

That Was The Week That Was — 3rd May 2020

During the sixth week of lockdown I explored some sound reactive work in Houdini. I'd played around with this type of stuff before, and even used it in client work, but I wanted to go a little deeper so I would have a good few things to refer too should the need arrive.

After a various iterations I put together a few experiments, one of which used a section of Ted Kennedy's press statement after the fated accident in the sixties, which I think is one of my favorite pieces of spoken audio. I also used the opening of Under Milk Wood read by Richard Burton. I also used some music from the wonderful Raymond Scott.

Talking of audio and music, OpenAI introduced Jukebox, a neural network which attempts to create complete songs, with sung lyrics, based on a training set of millions of songs across many genres. The results are already pretty impressive, bearing in mind this is only early days. Where will it be in a year or five years? Will we have pop stars that are purely machine learning generated?

Chanced on this fascinating documentary on the incredible life of Lee Miller. Vogue model, muse, surrealist photographer, wartime photo journalist.

Love this plywood sculpture from the Eames Office from 1943. Such a wonderful flowing form.