The Osiris Project

This is fun- the Osiris Project is an amazing technology/art project. Osiris is a visualization engine that uses song lyrics to create dynamic music videos using tagged images. Designed to interact with your media player, when you start playing a song, your media player will retrieve the current playing song’s title and artist. With that data in hand, Osiris then will search for the lyrics of the song and download them automatically. The returned song lyrics will be parsed into sing word tags (ignoring tags like “a”, “of,” and “the”, etc.). Osiris then searches the flickr database for images with those tags. The tagged images are returned and queue up. The images are then streamed as your song plays, with image effects that blend, filter, float, transform, or transpose themselves into dynamic visualizations. The result is a customized music video of sorts that displays relevant images along with your music. Although Osiris may not be something you use everyday, it’s a pretty amazing use of technology and worth a look.

Osiris got its start when a guy named Schuyler Maclay became obsessed with the connections between music mashups and words. Schuyler then stumbled upon the flash art project “Islands of Consciousness” by Mario Klingemann (http://incubator.quasimondo.com/flash/islands_of_consciousness.php ) and started thinking about the connection between music and sound. After a few chats with Sebastian and Zack, Schuyler presented the first conceptualization of what would become the Osiris Project. Now coded by a team of programmers from around the world, Osiris is bridging the gap between technology and art.