Visualizing Music

Alberto Antoniazza : Rock and Roll Tube Map

jjdonald — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:01:46 +0000

Alberto Antoniazza provides another well designed entry in the surprisingly popular “tube map of rock music” category.

He has a flickr page up with the full size version.

If you’re interested in the other tube map based rock maps, you can check out Dorian Lynskey’s map for sale at the London Transport Museum Shop (I think Paul had that one on his wall at some point.) Also worth checking out is the Last.fm tube tags project that was covered here previously.

Ward Shelley : Visualizing Frank Zappa and Rock Genres

jjdonald — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:27:53 +0000

Ward Shelly shares with us a wonderful hand painted rendition of the life and music of Frank Zappa. From his bio page:

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.

via

Charting the Beatles

jjdonald — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:23:41 +0000

Charting the Beatles is the brain child of Michael Deal, a New York based graphic artist. In his words:

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.

via

Sync Lost

jjdonald — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 02:17:52 +0000

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.

via

Musart – music on the spiral array

Paul — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:32:15 +0000

Music on the Spiral Array . Real-Time (MuSA.RT) explores the use of Chew’s Spiral Array model in real-time analysis and scientific visualization of tonal structures in music.

Tone-based music consists of sequential arrangements of notes that generate pitch structures over time. An expert listener is able to ascertain these structures over time. MuSA.RT allows listeners to see tonal structures as they hear them. Real-time tracking of tonal patterns in music also has widespread applications in music analysis, information retrieval, performance analysis, and expression synthesis.

MuSA.RT shows the names of the pitches played, the triads, and the keys, as the music unfolds in a performance. The structures are visualized and computed using the three-dimensional Spiral Array model. Two trackers, called Centers of Effect (CEs), one for longterm and one for shortterm information, show the history of the tonal trajectories.

The three-dimensional model dances to the rhythm of the music, spinning smoothly so that the current triad forms the background for the CE trails. The real-time MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) input can be captured from an acoustic piano through a Moog piano bar.

MuSA.RT was designed using François’ Software Architecture for Immersipresence, a general formalism for the design, analysis and implementation of complex and interactive software systems.

Project site: http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~mucoaco/MuSA.RT/

Decoding the “EROICA”

Paul — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 18:09:27 +0000

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.

(Thanks for the tip, Adam)

The Landscape of music

Paul — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:45:18 +0000

From AT&T’s lab. A nifty geographic representation of musical artist. Zoom in and out to find artists.

Creator: AT&T

Uses: GMAP – a technique for visualizing relations and structures as maps

Using Visualizations for Music Discovery

Paul — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 14:02:35 +0000

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 tube tags

Paul — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:39:57 +0000

PDF of the map

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

An Exploration of Real-Time Visualizations of Musical Timbre

Paul — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:47:39 +0000

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.

Researcher: Kai Siedenburg
Paper: An Exploration of Real-Time Visualizations of Musical Timbre