I am a composer/researcher with primary interests in generative art, audiovisual synthesis, digital sound synthesis, and media signal processing. I am currently a research associate in the Department of Computing at Goldsmiths. I hold a PhD in Media Arts and Technology from the Media Arts and Technology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara where I worked under the AlloSphere Research Facility, the IGERT Interactive Digital Multimedia Program, and transLab. I have been an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University where I also taught in the Art and Technology program.

Works

Adrift  is a 3D immersive audio/visual composition generated entirely from a recursive matrix multiplication. Wrapture  is a sonic and visual expression of an evolving space-time curve derived from an iterated function.
S Phase  is an audio/visual metaphor of the work a cell undergoes during interphase to prepare for division. sScale  is an instrument for real-time visual and aural exploration of harmonically resonant noise.
Traffic  is a study in emergent forms based on the interaction between elementary objects. Airemin  is a Theremin-like USB musical interface that measures its distance from objects using infrared sensing.
Worm Walker  uses the frequency domain representation of an image to control a separate stochastic walk blit of its pixel data.

Software

Gamma  is a cross-platform, C++ library for doing generic synthesis and filtering of numerical data. It is oriented towards real-time sound and graphics rendering, but is equally useful for non-real-time tasks.

GLV  (Graphics Library of Views) is a cross-platform GUI building toolkit using C++/OpenGL. GLV is specifically designed for creating interfaces to real-time, multimedia applications using hardware accelerated graphics.

AlloSystem  is a cross-platform suite of C++ components for building interactive multimedia tools and applications.

SuperCollider 3 Extensions  are a collection of classes and plugins for SuperCollider 3 including a frequency analyzier, break-point envelope editor, tuning scales, and looped-based sample player.

SynthEdit Modules  are custom modules for SynthEdit.

Laboratory

Supercollider 3 One-liners generate interesting sounds in one line of code.

Turtlets are single-line turtle graphics algorithms that generate complex patterns.

Publications

Putnam, L. (2012). The Harmonic Pattern Function: A Mathematical Model Integrating Synthesis of Sound and Graphical Patterns. PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara. [pdf]

Putnam, L. (2005). Transfer: An interactive program for real-time spectral transformations and visualization. Master's thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara. [pdf]

Putnam, L. (2015). Echo shaping using sums of damped complex sinusoids. Computer Music Journal, 39(2):67–76. [pdf]

Putnam, L., Kuchera-Morin, J., and Peliti, L. (2015). Studies in composing hydrogen atom wavefunctions. Leonardo, 48(2):158–166. [pdf]

Jochum, E. and Putnam, L. (2014). Robots and art: Interactive art and robotics education program in the humanities. In 3rd AAU Workshop on Robotics, Aalborg, Denmark. [pdf]

Putnam, L. (2014). A method of timbre-shape synthesis based on summation of spherical curves. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Computer Music Conference, pages 1332–1337, Athens, Greece. [pdf]

Putnam, L. (2014). Gamma: A C++ sound synthesis library further abstracting the unit generator. In Proceedings of the 2014 International Computer Music Conference, pages 1382–1387, Athens, Greece. [pdf]

Putnam, L., Wakefield, G., Ji, H., Adderton, D., Alper, B., and Kuchera-Morin, J. (2010). Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts, chapter Immersed in Unfolding Complex Systems. O’Reilly Media. [pdf]

Roberts, C., Wright, M., Putnam, L., Wakefield, G., and Kuchera-Morin, J. (2010). Dynamic interactivity inside the Allosphere. In Proceedings of the 2010 New Interfaces for Musical Expression Conference, Sydney, Australia. [pdf]

Kuchera-Morin, J., Hollerer, T., Bell, B., Putnam, L., Mangiat, S., and Roberts, C. (2009). Towards a general-purpose infrastructure for novel collaborative multimodal human-computer interfaces. In Workshop on Media Arts, Science, and Technology, Santa Barbara, California.

Turk, M., Hollerer, T., Arisona, S. M., Kuchera-Morin, J., Coffin, C., Hoetzlein, R., Putnam, L., Overholt, D. (2008). Creative collaborative exploration in multiple environments. In Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. [pdf]

Wakefield, G., Overholt, D., Putnam, L., Thompson, J., Smith, W., Novak, M., Kuchera-Morin, J. (2008). The Allobrain: An interactive, stereographic, 3D audio immersive environment. In CHI Conference Workshop on Sonic Interaction Design. [pdf]

Bell, B., Kleban, J., Overholt, D., Putnam, L., Thompson, J., and Kuchera-Morin, J. (2007). The multimodal music stand. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, pages 62–65, New York, USA. [pdf]

Pope, S., Amatriain, X., Putnam, L., Castellanos, J., and Avery, R. (2006). Metamodels and design patterns in CSL4. In Proceedings of the 2006 International Computer Music Conference, pages 47–54, New Orleans, USA. [pdf]