A flock of singing boids

This project represents my very first experience with live coding. The animation is made with p5.js and WebGL, and the music is made with SuperCollider. The music also uses this free pack of piano samples.

The animation is based on Boids flocking algorithms, which I first learned about in video tutorials made by Daniel Shiffman. Shiffman has covered this subject a few times already, but this video in particular was the inspiration behind this project.

The project’s full video can be watched on YouTube, and a shorter version (which contains, in my opinion, the most interesting part of the longer video) is on my Twitter feed.

Source code

The code written for this project is available on GitHub. Please note that in order to be able to control the experiment via live coding, it’s necessary to run this code using Les environs, a live coding environment that I’m currently working on (and that currently exists in a very incomplete form).

Context

This blog post is part of my research project Towards an algorithmic cinema, started in April 2018. I invite you to read the first blog post of the project to learn more about it.