Instant Knoll

2005

When The Knoll (the building that houses CCRMA) was renovated in 2004/2005 we (Richard Humphrey and myself) installed a cheap ethernet connected camera on top of Trailer B (a temporary trailer behind The Knoll that lasted all of 20 years!). The other end of the ethernet cable was connected to one of our computers, which snapped one picture every minute, day and night, for almost 1 1/2 years, and stored them in one of our servers. More than 28Gbytes of low quality pictures...

"Instant Knoll" is a 5 minute excersize in algorithmic video and audio generation. A set of simple scripts gather a timeline for a movie composed of 20 minute fragments of each day starting at sunrise, each one successively later in the day by 20 minutes, with the landscape changing second by second. Storms are captured and one of them actually toppled the camera (which kept snapping pictures all the time!). Additional functions perform video compositing of "interesting" events hand picked from the pictures into the streaming background (cement trucks, storms, rainbows). Titles and fadeout are also incorporated algorithmically. The same script writes a short lisp program that is latter interpreted by CLM into a soundtrack that is precisely synchronized to the video, and both are assembled together by open source programs.

"Instant Knoll" was created with open source tools including bash, perl, ImageMagik, mpeg2enc, CLM, etc, etc.

The first version of "Instant Knoll" was very short (less than two minutes long) and was created for Mark Applebaum's Popcorn video show at Stanford, on February 2nd, 2005.

Performances

• Newstage Festival: Afternoon Concert, CCRMA, April 29th 2006
• WOCMAT 2006 Concert, International Workshop on Computer Music and Audio Technology, Taipei, Taiwan, March 18th 2006.
• MusiCollage, Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, March 8th 2005.

Fernando Lopez-Lezcano

Composer, performer, lecturer and computer systems administrator at CCRMA, Stanford University

Quick Links

El Dinosaurio
Applesauce Modular Mark V
Planet CCRMA

Music & Performances

Of Dinosaurs and Other Creatures
The Well Modulated Dinosaur
The Love Songs of Flying Dinosaurs
El PianoSaurio
Dinosaur He[a]rd!
Wings
Resurrections
Pia[NOT] Etude
The Miraculous Multiplication of Strings
Y Sonó Como Arpa Vieja
Un Esqueleto en la Cocina
The Hidden and Mysterious Machinery of Sound
Modulate me, please?
Space, S[acred|ecular]
Vox Voxel
Toast and Jam
Divertimento de Cocina
Velvet Skin, Heart of Steel
Fugue 1 (Fanfare)
Jurassic Modulations
Earth Songs
Dinosaur Skin
A Very Fractal Cat, Somewhat T[h]rilled
65 Second Bycicle
The Dinosaur At War
Exit Variations
El Dinosaurio Habla
Kitchen <-> Miniature(s)
Instant Knoll
iICEsCcRrEeAaMm
House of Mirrors
With Room to Grow
Knock knock, anybody there?
Three Dreams
Espresso Machine II
Hot'n Cold
Quest