It seems like this could be a useful exploration in quite a few ways. For one, having an intimate understanding of data probably isn’t a creative developer’s strength. In the past, I considered understanding data structures and sources to be not necessary for the sake of specialization. Since I’ve been at EVB, I’ve been continually exposed to the contrary aspects of this misconception. More-so, recently I’ve been bombarded with ideas that require a better understanding of data visualization concepts and in some cases, I didn’t realize it. For instance, I bought a Lemur a few months ago and sadly I’ve had not much of a chance to play with it yet for a lot of reasons. Fundamentally, my plans are to visualize the data that is being transmitted from this device within a java/processing environment. — I will be starting with a plan to research and may need to further break down the oscP5 library before I can get there. — Additionally, any consumer generated content being managed within the sites I’ve recently worked on have been some simple form of data visualization, i.e. upload your mom’s face sites… yeah it’s a stretch but still! Lastly, and more classically, there are a opportunities both discovered and undiscovered far more plentiful than I had ever previously imagined in the social media track of our industry. And this kind of stuff is actually useful. This is particularly exciting for me because of my multiple converging passions/fascinations: motion design, generative imagery, generative sound, generative… stuff, heuristics, genome project shit, this era of sociology, experimental hardware. As vague and/or vast as this term may be, I have a good feeling that this exploration will lead me to some excellent material and new ways of thinking.
Here are a couple great places that got my heart racing:
http://processing.org/exhibition/features/koblin/
http://code.google.com/apis/visualization/

Yesterday morning, I had been half asleep on the train on the way to work and i don’t exactly know how i got to the point of thinking about this. it was related to the generation of music with some of the libraries I’ve toyed with in processing, but it went way crazy. First I was picturing the contrary to common notion that sound is created from silence: sound being added or multiplied to what’s already there. So, the idea started to evolve a little and I thought how cool it would be to create a piece of music or even an instrument of sorts that is initially based on a very clearly recognized constant. Not like a rhythm or even a synth chord. A more raw sound that would be intentionally manipulated by creating interference patterns. Maybe this is another way to think about the same thing, but I guess I enjoy doing shit backwards before settling on what I’m told to do.

This got me thinking about other physical aspects of sound. To my limited knowledge, there isn’t nearly as much consideration dedicated to sound physics simulation in game development compared to visual. But they surely have a lot in common, right? Consider this: any object that has been registered to some physics simulator might have properties that express its simulated mass, friction, resistance, dampening factors, shape, etc. Forces can be applied to them. There are also properties that act like constants for the environment like gravity and maybe even some friction or resistance that is applied to anything that has a non-zero velocity. But these are constants that never change to account for turbulence created by an object displacing the air. This is one limitation but maybe we aren’t too far off this kind of computing. Or maybe we’re there already. Anyway, this all might seem complicated, but the idea is really simple: an object traveling through space collides with and displaces a number of other objects which produces a unique sound per incident. all of this is multiplied together to create the cognition of one sound in one moment of time. We might have a long way to go before this kind of computing can be done at 60 fps, but it might be a fun thing to experiment with in processing on a smaller scale.