Creative Coding on Evan King

Engram: Generative audio sampler

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: I’m launching the Engram, a hardware sampler that generates new sounds in real-time using embedded generative audio models. It combines traditional sampling with voice control and audio “model bending”, giving musicians new ways to explore and create unique sounds.

Contact me or sign up as a tester to help shape Engram’s future. EDIT: The call for testers is now closed.

How do we make AI art less boring?

People have mixed feelings about AI. Everyone I talk to – from engineers to physicians to artists – agrees on one thing: AI changes their relationship with their labor. The response to this, however, varies quite a bit. This ambivalence is most apparent in creative fields, where AI boosters are selling the ability to generate whole books, movies, albums, and works of visual art from a few prompts. From an efficiency perspective, this is optimal. But art has never been about efficiency: it’s about history, the artist’s abilities and limits, and the artistic process. Many artists are responding to these efficiency promises with rightful animus and distrust. The artists, in fact, are not the customer. Their bosses are.

Mishearings: Turning ASR models into poets

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: I built a tool for assembling Dadaist poems from ASR transcriptions of misheard speech, and you can play with it in your web browser. I built it with my MoonshineJS library, Tone.js, and p5js.

Introduction

My goal lately has been to build a JS library for simple on-device speech recognition in web applications. While there are many practical uses for this, I felt the urge recently to explore its creative potential. Speech recognition models are a bit more utilitarian than purely generative models – you put speech in and get text out – so I had my work cut out for me.

A private ambient summarizer device

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

An ePaper display shows the most common words overheard from nearby conversations.

I wrapped up my PhD recently. It’s in “Electrical and Computer Engineering”, though it’s more descriptive to say that I spent my four years of graduate school working in “Ubiquitous Computing” or ubicomp. Ubicomp researchers aim to make technology that “fit[s] the human environment” rather than forcing humans to adapt themselves to environments dominated by obtrusive technology. Established by the late Mark Weiser at Xerox PARC in the early nineties, ubicomp has philosophical roots: Weiser was strongly influenced by the idea of “entanglement”, which suggests that humans are inextricably linked to (and influenced by) their surroundings.

Self-updating pothos timelapse camera

Sun, 25 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

A daily-updated timelapse of my pothos plant.

While I’ve cared for (and killed) a variety of different houseplants over the years, pothos plants are probably my favorite. They are incredibly hardy, easy to propogate from clippings, and they grow quickly. I’ve always been curious to learn a bit more about how these plants maneuver as they grow, so I decided to set up an automated system to monitor mine.

Combining an ESP8266 equipped with a camera, some Philips Hue smart lights, and a Raspberry Pi, this system takes a picture of the plant every hour and prepares a rolling timelapse of the past week every day at midnight. A bit of code handles exposure by balancing out the smart lights in my living room and turning on an overhead light before taking the picture. Another bit of code does some color balancing, yielding a better looking photo. ~~Each day it uploads the latest timelapse to pothos.evanking.io. The timelapse above is the latest, updated automatically.~~ UPDATE: I took this down when I moved in 2023 and haven’t had a chance to put it up again. It was a fun project though, so I’m keeping it here for archival purposes.

My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread” is a cozy, hazy art-pop exploration of the interplay between everyday human life and the natural world. I released this EP as Olivia Nowadays in 2022 along with my friend and collaborator, Kent Carson.

Blending field recordings with lush instrumentation, warm rhythms, and lyrics imbued with the whimsy of magical realism, the five songs on MPAHOBAT dip in and out of the experiences of different people, animals, and automatons to explore this fraught relationship between human lifestyles and nature.

Petri: Cellular rhythm generator for eurorack

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Eurorack is an open format for modular synthesizers—hardware-based audio devices that enable you to craft compositions (called “patches”) by routing voltage signals between different modules. Some modules produce sound, others only produce voltages that you can use to build rhythms, melodies, etc. It’s a highly-flexible way of creating music: one that rewards experimentation, and an analytical approach to composition.

Having played with (and made small code contributions to) the open-source modular synthesizer project VCV Rack, I decided sometime in 2019 that I should learn more about the “real thing”. I first started by building popular DIY modules like the Turing Machine and the Penrose and eventually graduated to designing my own module, which I call the petri. I’ve always found computational processes that model natural systems interesting, so I set out to build something with that in mind. Petri (named for Julius Richard Petri, inventor of the Petri dish) embodies that principle, using selectable cellular automata rule sets and starting populations to generate rhythmic sequences of control voltage pulses. It’s like a little ecosystem of cell life in modular form.

From sea levels to music with CSV to MIDI

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Data sonification describes the process by which data is translated into sound. There’s a variety of reasons this might be worthwhile, from purely artistic or aesthetic purposes to its potential as an assistive technology for the visually impaired. I like to think of it as synesthesia: it allows us to experience information in a different modality than it was originally expressed.

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to design a data sonification algorithm—it’s highly dependent on the structure of the data you’re working with and the type of sound you’re trying to create. Since comma-separated values (CSV) are a common way of storing numerical datasets and MIDI is the standard for representing melodic information, it struck me that a tool that could convert between the two formats would come in handy as a generative composition tool. So back in 2018, I made one.