stringTheory from Steve Varga on Vimeo.

stringTheory is an experimental program I made that is not as much data vis as it is abstract data. Using the concept of String Theory (theoretical physics) to visualize my email, the program first shows everyone that has sent me email in the last year as particles within a group of atoms. Each node when rolled over shows the numer of emails this address has sent me as well as playing a tone based on this number. After clicking one of these nodes, that person’s messages are abstracted further as particles (protons & neutrons maybe? that doesn’t quite work yet but its loosely based…) which contain particles of the subject of the email. Rolling over one of the messages displays the message’s subject and plays a tone for each letter, with the timing based on the overall length of the subject and the tone of each letter based on both the message length and a value I’m giving to each letter.

The project uses PHP to collect my email to a MySQL database, then openFrameworks is used to grab a php file which generates XML from the database. This XML data is then used to drive the visuals.

The audio is generated by pushing OSC commands from openFrameworks to SuperCollider. The tones are somewhat harmonious but I’m just getting started with SuperCollider and I’d love to see what I can do with this data once I get a better understanding of the full power of super collider.

Overall I can already think of a lot more interesting things I could do with this but I’m super happy with the results so far….