Matthew M. Conroy's blog

Part of some sound experiments. Here, I played a tin whistle and modified the sound, live, with a Csound instrument that has delayed copies of the signal interfere with each other spectrally. No oscillators.

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A few years ago, I was walking around my neighborhood and came across some items marked "free" on the sidewalk. One of the items was a nice, old tricycle that I thought would be perfect for my friend's daughter. There was also a beautiful old pail full of nails (and a few screws). I put the pail on the tricycle and pushed it all back to my house. The pail then sat in my garage until the other day, I was taking apart an old electric toothbrush and found the strong magnet that most electric toothbrushes seem to contain. I threw this in the pail, and when I pulled it out, it brought a nice clump of nails with it. Doing this 100+ times and photographing each clump resulted in this image.

Remnants of spattered coffee in my sink.

This flying bug was crawling around my kitchen floor today.

I made another chapbook of algorithmic drawings. This one is based on the idea of connecting midpoints of line segments, with different starting line segments and different conditions on angles and segment lengths. Send me your mailing address and I'll mail a copy to you!

A yellowjacket in a friend's backyard.

I sewed a button back on for the first time in many years.

I've been making audio versions of the logistic map. The idea I'm using is to create a sound such that its spectrogram looks like the bifurcation diagram of the logistic map. So far I've made two versions.

First version

Second version

The second version is lower in pitch, has panning according to pitch (lower pitch more left, higher pitch more right), gets louder when there is "more" chaos, and more quickly reaches the first bifurcation.

Not much of an addition, but I added some probabilities related to the game Can't Stop (which I only learned about recently) to the collection (see problem 73). I calculated these with some simple code to run through all 1296 possibilities, very straightforward. The game is very complicated; see, e.g., this paper by James Glenn and Christian Aloi. I'm not sure what problems related to the game I might add, but I wanted to get these probabilities added for my own curiosity and in case anyone else is interested.

Took some photos on my walk to campus today. Here's one.