Creative Computing

Joel Gethin Lewis

Week 4: Lecture 7: Compressing

Group meditation.
Questions?
Moving to four dimensions.
Some artists working in four dimensions.
The Fast Fourier Transform.
Three kinds of feedback: audio, visual and interactive.
Afternoon Modernism trip with CCI BSc group and Dr Charlotte Webb to Victoria and Albert Museum.

Are you recording Joel? Have you taken the register first?

All questions allowed!
2 minutes alone on post it notes, then double group size every 1 minutes until it's the whole group.
This idea came from Zach Lieberman. He does this exercise at the start of every session of School of Poetic Computation in New York.

Going from Cube to Hypercube.
You can also go from the Sphere to the Hypersphere.
You can also think of Time as the fourth dimension.
You can use any variable as a new dimension, and measure distance between them using Pythagoras, as we saw in the previous article.
Perfect Shapes in Higher Dimensions from Numberphile, which is a great channel to get lost in.

Text compression is looking for patterns in text so that you can store those patterns, rather than the original content in order to reduce the file size of the text.
Data compression is the general task of compressing any kind of information to save on bandwidth for transmission or file size for data storage, both of which used to be a lot more limited than today, to see how expensive and limited storage used to be, see this article.
See this Computerphile video on Elegant LZ77 compression for more information.

The Fast Fourier transform is a way of splitting up any waveform into a series of simpler waves.
This can be very useful to find out how much bass, mid and treble any sound has and is used in music visualisers.
See this great interactive website for an explanation and further links.
See this interactive Better Explained article for a further, further explanation.

Afternoon Modernism trip with CCI BSc group and Dr Charlotte Webb to Victoria and Albert Museum.

Thanks!