Classical Convert

No and/or Little Motivation and/or Inspiration

Ah. I’m away from the usual location of work sloggery for a glorious few days of detachment. The grinding of lab has been left back behind four hundred and seventy-seven miles (plus one, for the google map uncatchable on-ramps) of chilly roads. However, my work ethic seems to have been abandoned with my work, and I am quite happily sitting around here not typing. Mostly. If I were to be typing it would probably be about:

1. The niceness of having a laptop loaded with music on-hand
2. The realization that 1 would be unecessary (or more convenient) given a year of technological advances (alright, I know this doesn’t make much sense when compactified into this subtle little description. What the muttering is hinting at is that I shouldn’t have had to copy everything over - it should all be streamable)
3. God, what was three?

So this post is more a motivational effort then anything else, sorry about the lack of content; ideally it’s an inroad to more, actually, interesting things. We shall see how that pans out…

Visualization Via Video

Yuck, been sick these last few days with not-wanting-to-eat feelings thrusting their unpleasant paths through my abdomen. Bastards. Now it’s magically altered itself (or they … themselves, the plurality of this anthropomorphizing is not well defined) into an annoying pain of a pain in my hip. Clearly I am a wreck and destined to be crumpled into glue ever so soon. Anyway, not to skip around the topic of choice: I’ve updated the previous visualization work into video form. Check this out:

It’s at least passably interesting, isn’t it? Mostly I’m just relishing and wallowing gleefully in a minimal amount of proudness for working out how to animate a bunch of pictures with a line down the middle…

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.

Quickies: Playing on the Wii, Pyongyang, Polish Janitor-Pianists

The New York Philharmonic is going to perform in North Korea next year, following in the footsteps of the Philadelphia Orchestra (who played in China in 1973) and the Boston Symphony (who played in the USSR in 1956)

Next year Nintendo are going to unleash Wii Music, which will let people “conduct” a virtual orchestra. While I don’t think it’ll endanger any jobs, if it’s anything like their previous efforts it’ll be tonnes of fun - and hugely popular. There’s more information and a few (pretty horrible) videos here.

A polish janitor, spotted via webcam playing Chopin in the chapel, has been newly employed full-time as a pianist. Story and video here.

My (somewhat disappointing) Visualization Efforts

Hmmm. Music visualization is a pain in the arse. I’m simultaneously attempting to produce a real-time frequency visualizer type dealie, and learn Python (which is what all the cool kids are using for programming) making it way, way harder than it should be. Since it takes flipping ages to calculate all the necessary Fourier transforms it seems best to produce videos of the visualization, instead of trying to do it in real time. Which is probably impossible. Currently they look pretty, errr, lacking. Prettying things up is probably going to be the largest part of the problem.

At the moment each video frame looks like this:

See what I mean? In the next few days I’ll play around with graphics routines to try and generate a proper spectrogram. Then we’ll be in a bit more business.