My Projects

Falling Grace

What happens when you drop a jumble of polygons in OpenGL? Well, nothing, unless you have a physics engine to throw some mass and gravity into the mix. What happens when the jumble of polygons hits the floor? It tries to land nicely, of course. I wrote Falling Grace in the summer of 2004, as part of an undergraduate course in Computer Animation. While most students formed teams and produced a general-purpose animation tool, I had already done that during the summer previous, and so wanted to try something new. Building on top of a free physics simulator called the Open Dynamics Engine, my goal was to create 3-dimensional humanoid and quadruped creatures that could automatically use their limbs to cushion a fall. Links to videos of my results are below, along with some fun videos of ODE exploding; you'll need DivX to play them.

STARR

I've rarely been satisfied with doing the "standard project" in my project-based courses, so when I was given the opportunity to propose any project that I liked for my Machine Learning class in the winter of 2006, I headed out into left field. The result of my efforts is STARR, a tool for automatically generating drum tracks for given input melodies, all in the MIDI format. Why on earth would someone want such a tool?, you might ask. The fact is that when I compose music, I use my computer to save it in the MIDI format, and I typically don't worry about making a drum track, simply because it's fairly tedious work. Surely my computer can do that for me, I thought, and it turns out that in many cases, it now can. Although the system is far from perfect (I created it in less than a month), I think that the results still sound pretty good. You can find MIDIs of the results below along with a link to my project report, which describes how the system works. Did I mention that it currently plays by imitating the drum tracks from 89 Beatles' songs? No? Well, it does.

Art & Photography

You may have noticed from the various pages on this site that I tend to enjoy taking pictures and doing graphic design. If you'd like to see more, please take a look at my gallery. In fact, only one of the images on this site isn't my own; can you guess which one?

Composition

As I say on my music page, I've written a fair amount of music over the past several years, some of which has even been completed and performed. You can find links to recordings of some of my songs below.