Metasyn is an interface that allows visitors to explore the collection of contemporary art in Roskiilde. The visualization includes an interactive 3D browser that is among the best I’ve seen. Items are organized in the space as follows:
The objects are lined up vertically by year showing the distribution of objects over time. For a given object, its vertical order is a product of the ‘grade of dominance’ that the related artist has. The objects that are made by artists whose objects are commonly accruing in the collection are placed closer to the ground plane. This results in an organisation where the most dominant artists are represented close to ‘the core’ of the structure, while the less known artists ends up in the periphery. This decision was made to support the impression of exploring the unknown in the outer areas of the collection, and to increase chances additionally that the museum’s choice of popular artists are promoted.
Ward Shelley works as an artist in Brooklyn, New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations defy classification. Over the last five years, Shelley has concentrated on bizarre functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment.
Shelley also works on a series of diagramatic paintings, timelines of art-related subjects such as the careers of artists working in de-materialized media and the history of art scenes. The best known of these is the Williamsburg Timeline Drawing and Downtown Body, recently published in Bomb Magazine.
He also has a great infographic of various rock genres:
In fact, he has a number of wonderfully realized visualizations covering various art figures and movements from Andy Warhol to Avant Garde. You can access and view the entire list from this page.
These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings
Eventually, Michael intends to produce a book of these charts, and has a placeholder website that should have more details once they’re available.
There’s also an extensive collection of pictures available on his Flickr group.
The popularization of electronic instruments and computers, allied to the broad and easy reachable information through the internet, enabled the appearance of countless rhythmic structures, giving rise to new styles and sub styles within contemporary electronic music.
Created in Processing, SyncLost is a multi-user immersive installation on the history of electronic music. The project’s objective is to create an interface where users can view all the connections between the main styles of electronic music through visual and audible feedback.
When you click on a particular node, all connections are shown – where the style comes from and which had been influenced by it – furthermore the music plays and a representative textual information is displayed. The visual feedback is given in real time, according to the user’s choice. The music rhythm serves as a visualization parameter of the style’s icon, creating multiple sonorous visualizations. You control the visualization through wiimote controls, while audible feedback is given through wireless headphones.
The graph above plots tempi in the first movement, in terms of average beats per minute; the fastest is Hermann Scherchen, at 174.58, and the slowest is Otto Klemperer, in 1970, at 110.74.
Hot of the presses, here are the sides for the tutorial that Justin and Paul are presenting at ISMIR 2009 on October 26.
Note that the live presentation will include many demonstrations and videos of visualizations that just are not practical to include in a PDF. If you have the chance, be sure to check out the tutorial at ISMIR in Kobe on the 26th.
Last.fm has added a few visualizations to their VIP (subscribers only) section of their playground. One visualization is called Tube Tags – it will represent your listening history in the style of the London Tube. Each colored line represents a genre / social tag:
It’s an attractive visualization drawing on the design of the original tube map designer Harry Beck
This project explores several different ways of visualizing sets of extracted audio features in real-time. These visualizations are realized in a toolkit for the Max/MSP/Jitter programming environment. The primary purpose is to visualize timbral changes in the sense of exploratory data analysis. The program has four main parts: feature extraction, visualization, similarity, and audio control. Features are calculated by using a combination of pre-existing libraries, as e.g. the zsa.descriptors and the CNMAT analyser object. Additionally, we introduce a simple notion of timbral distance, which can be used in real-time performance situations, and present its performance for a set of different textures. The visualizations are further used to inform the control of audio effects by feature trajectories.
As part of our tutorial on music visualizations at ISMIR at the end of the month we’ll be surveying the wide range of personal, human-rendered visualizations of the music space. There’s a wide variety of such visualizations – but one of my favorites, is the Velvet Underground Evolutionary Tree
put together by the author of the Kenosha Kid’s blog. It’s a phylogenetic tree with the Velvet Underground as the common ancestor – it has bands as the branches, and music genres as the leaves (along with a stray calamari), and a dig at the ‘barnacle’ power pop critic Steve Simels. This visualization has it all!
