Shfla: Shoegaze Hierarchical Fractal Language Architecture

52 pointsposted 8 days ago
by Tetraslam
(github.com)

17 Comments

Tetraslam

8 days ago

Hi! I'm a college freshman at Northeastern, and this is my first hackathon project for a major hackathon (MIT Media Lab). It won the Unconventional Computing track prize, so I'm pretty happy! I made this because I'm a major conlanger, and I was wondering if it would be possible to think in terms of sound when looking at an image. Fractals have easy-to-map parameters, so I created SHFLA, a language which takes in music, and creates fractals based on 0.1 second (you can change this) chunks of music! It's Turing-complete, so you can technically encode a ridiculous amount of information and computation in my system, although writing it out as music might take a while.

Hope you find the project cool :)

compressedgas

8 days ago

[flagged]

Tetraslam

8 days ago

I know what you mean, and I'll work on it :)

SHFLA is Turing-complete though, so I am hoping people see that it has more potential than just being a music visualizer as I keep improving it! I'm currently in the process of rewriting it in Nim using SDL2, so once I get it to a performant state I'm going to implement an information-as-music encoder and all that.

wpm

3 days ago

I hope you figure out how to give constructive feedback without being so rude.

adamhartenz

3 days ago

I hope they teach you how to communicate better. What you have here is your own summary based on limited knowledge.

digilypse

3 days ago

For most people, a description is better when it’s easier to understand and connect with. But you’re not most people.

pipeline_peak

3 days ago

It's a music visualizer, just call things what they are.

You'll get better responses without throwing in terms like "shoegaze" or "architecture" for something less than 300 loc.

athorax

3 days ago

I'm not understanding what this has to do with shoegaze. Did you just use that in the name for funsies?

dkdbejwi383

3 days ago

I was hoping it was going to be a very niche language where e.g. `await` is `while you sleep`, `void` functions are `loveless` and so on

Tetraslam

3 days ago

I'm so adding this in the next version!

Tetraslam

3 days ago

yes 100% but the reply to your comment is very funny so I'll implement it in the next version :)

the project started as a shoegaze-specific language, hence the name!

indiraschka

8 days ago

this is pretty cool! consider including a demo video and images at the beginning when explaining the project

javajosh

3 days ago

Upvoted for Shoegaze reference. Suggest hosting a demo with My Bloody Valentine "Loveless" as the default musical selection. I will also echo the other commenters who believe your communication needs to improve; it is unlikely that I will download and install your code because the risk/reward ratio is poor, as it is for most OSS (open-source software).

Note: distribution wins in software. Suggest you rewrite this to be at the intersection of distributable and local, which basically means running in the browser. Consider porting to JavaScript and distributing either as a simple static webpage, or perhaps a codepen. This might be an interesting use of two interesting but little-used browser APIs, namely WebAudio and WebGL or perhaps WebGPU. For simplicity I'd target Chrome first.

Tetraslam

3 days ago

understood, will rework it this week. Thanks for the feedback :)

user

3 days ago

[deleted]