Geeky Music Visualizations
Not since Walt Disney’s Fantasia, or G-Force on my Mac, have I enjoyed an abstract visualization of music as in this short piece by Renaud Halle called Sonar. I’d like him to keep going.
In the same vein is Electroplankton, by the Japanese wizard Toshio Iwai. You get to make your own “video.” A sample here:
But there are other ways to visualize music. One cool experiment projects notes in color stripes which accumulate as the piece is played. The device is called a Clavilux 2000, invented by Jonas Heuer.
As Fast Company notes about the gizmo:
Length and vertical position show the force of impact, while width shows how long the note played; the colors correspond to various tonalities. (Discordant notes are marked in contrasting colors.) Thus, the more tonal variations a piece has, the more colors will show up. When a piece is over, the visualization remains, as a visual summary of the music that was just played–what notes were played most, which were loudest, and what harmonies the piece revolved around.
