Hello friends; my name is Dan. I recently made this project and wanted to share.
asteroidblock is a web-based, interactive, atmospheric pad synthesizer which queries NASAs asteroid API, using live proximity data to throttle initial parameters of the synth.
A few notes:
—asteroidblock works entirely in your browser (desktop or mobile), and anyone can have a go with it today.
—The queried asteroid data is fetched in realtime, so you can keep coming back whenever NASA add new ones to their API.
—Currently the data influences all available parameters that you see within the UI; I also have some plans for non-visible interference.
—The synth is open-sourced on Github, so developers/programmers feel free to have a play with this!
For those curious further, I’ve been discussing this project and other audio-visual persuits over on my instagram! Feel free to give me a message if you had any questions too! https://www.instagram.com/daniel.aagentah/
That sounds really freaking cool. I’ll for sure check this out. Thank you for sharing this.
Edit: just opened up the web play for the first time and have so many questions. I’m a developer too and would love to you know how you went about making something like this. Mind if I DM you sometime @daniel.aagentah?
Damn, that’s a cool idea. So it basically does an API call and sets the inits to something in relation to the asteroid data?
Not sure if you’ve thought about this (or have the modular bug) but this would be cool as shit as one or more VCV modules or something. Even if it’s just a giant macro hub that can be used to control other things, I could see that being wild
What a fantastic project! I’m getting all sorts of cool sounds out of it just by swapping asteroids. I love that you provided a lot of reasonable audio tools inside there instead of making it a one-trick pony.
What’s really sinking in for me is what a great framework this is. Like initially it’s “space is cool!” but asteroid data is just numbers at the end of the day, used to drive a completely unrelated set of data. It could be easily extended to basically any API that contains enough data sets to be interesting (my mind immediately went to NOAA and USGS, and maybe FiveThirtyEight if you want some ominous political music lol).
@daniel.aagentah I haven’t dug into the code yet, but I’m curious how you went about processing the incoming data - are you normalizing/scaling it or is similar enough across 'roids to just use what the API hands you?
Thank you for sharing this.