My (less disappointing!) Visualization Efforts
Aha! This round of music visualization is going somewhat better than then last incarnation. Instead of a crappy bunch of graphs I now have a totally official and fancy-pantsy looking spectrogram going on, albeit in a static not-yet-animated form. Here is what the first 120 seconds or so of the second movement Beethoven’s piano sonata op. 111 look like (click for the full version, the image below is a small section at the start):
This shows the dominant sound frequencies present in the music, over a period of time. These frequencies correspond in a not completely linear way to the notes which are being played. This lets you see the shapes of the melodies as the piece progresses (from left to right in the spectrogram). I think with cleverer coloring, and animation, this will become much more apparent. Still, not bad for a first, errr, second try!
The recording I am using is from the wikimedia page on Beethoven. The software I am using to create it is all open-source: sox, python, numpy, pil.