CreativeCodingGalaxy

Overview

A processing sketch of a galaxy visualising the music I listened to

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Key

• Each star is a song
• The glow colour represents the genre of the song
  • Pop: Purple
  • Rock: Red
  • Indie: Yellow
  • Electronic: Teal
• The nebula colour represents the time of day I listened to the song
  • Morning: Pink
  • Afternoon: Orange
  • Evening: Green
  • Night: Blue

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Data collected

• Song I listened to
• Genre of the song
• Date and time I listened to it

Data Collection

I collected my data using lastFM to track the songs I listened to and what time I listened to them

I wrote a small python script to grab the song title, artist, and time listened, and put the data into a csv

There were a lot of songs so I put the songs and artists into chat GPT to get the genre for each one - This is the only place I used AI

Then I updated the csv manually

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File explanations

Galaxy

• Loads data
• Calls visualise data, create nebula, and nebula texture
• Generates constant random positions for for the decorative stars
• Displays the galaxy

CreateNebula

• Draws each nebula using a series of quads
• Adds a verticle wobble to each quad within the nebulas
• Rotates the nebulas around the the z axis at their centre
• Changes the quad size to make them appear to move forwards/backwards
• Creates a colour gradient from front to back for each nebula
• Uses NebulaTexture to texture each quad
• Uses billboarding to make sure the nebulas always face the camera as the camera rotates to avoid weird visuals

NubulaTexture

• Creates a PGraphics texture for the nebulas
• Uses perlin noise to make a cloudy texture
• Uses a mask to fade out the edges

VisualiseSongs

• Positions song's stars within the nebula corresponding to the time of day I listened to the song
• Colours the song's star based on genre
• Draws the stars as diamond shapes
• Shrinks and expands each star to make it look like it's twinkling
• Uses billboarding again to make sure the stars always face the camera since they're 2D shapes

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Inspiration

Some of the procedural techniques in this project were inspired by Daniel Shiffman’s Coding Train videos, especially the explanations of Perlin noise. I used these concepts as a foundation, then adapted them into a 3D galaxy system with my own:

• nebula texture generator
• layered quad rendering
• spherical star distribution
• time-of-day clustering
• genre-based colouring
• camera-aligned billboards