Realtime Liner Notes: Visualizing Music
December 5th, 2007 Posted in classical music, liner notes, youtube
Or should that be Living Liner Notes? (thanks Miss M!)
When YouTubing this post about Bach on the accordion, this visualization video popped up in the “related stuff” sidebar:
Which is very nicely related to all of the understanding music via automated liner notes I have been incessantly harping on about recently. Some thoughts on this particular instance of visualization are:
- A surprising number of patterns jump out at you when you can clearly see the basic relationships between notes being played – but in an intuitive, not mentally analytical fashion.
- It takes a lot of work to produce something that both sounds decent and is visually clear.
- People are fascinated by this – there are almost 600,000 views of this video.
Now what would be really great is something which can suck in an MP3 and spit out something like this. That’s a fairly lofty goal, but I’m going to play around a bit with visualization methods and see if I can anything remotely convincing to work. I’ll try and document my progress on here, starting with the most basic, trivial visualizations.
But perhaps I’ll wait until after my Friday biochemistry final to get started…
