Comments on: Visualizing Music

By: demian

demian — Mon, 09 May 2011 18:58:25 +0000

Ok here is an example of how you could present the exact same information in absolute (non-symbolic) form: for each instrument and each voice or line being played one each instrument you could display a dot on a screen. The dots can move up and down with frequencies and amplitudes of oscillation which are the have the same relationships to each other as the actual sound waves that the real instruments would produce. This would visually convey the exact same information as the original recording. This particular way of doing it wouldn’t be very effective, I just thought of it off he top of my head. The brain’s processing systems responsible for interpreting frequencies and amplitudes of oscillation are probably not available for information coming in from the eyes. Having said that, I suppose the eyes are sensitive to differences in the frequencies of light waves. So the different frequencies of the tones could be easily translated into different frequencies of light waves (in other words different colours). Differences in the amplitudes of the sounds waves can be translated into different intensities of light.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 09 May 2011 16:05:39 +0000

You’re going to lose something in visual translation because you’re going to simplify it to meet your criteria of creating a pattern that you can experience in a manner similar to hearing the music. You could, for instance, record a performance digitally into a lossless format and then print out the hexadecimal numbers that correspond to that digital pattern, but can you extract the music from the pattern? I’ve known people who can approximate hearing music when they read a score, by drawing on their experience of what instruments sound like and knowledge of how to read a score, but that’s very difficult even though a score is a greatly simplified translation of the music.

By: demian

demian — Mon, 09 May 2011 15:40:47 +0000

Why should any visual translation necessarily loose something? The sound waves simply embody a pattern. The pattern is very complicated if you consider the nuances of the waves of particular tones from particular instruments. But nevertheless, they are patterns which could quite easily be displayed visually. The question is whether or not the brain would respond in the same way to seeing the pattern instead of hearing it. Perhaps the part of the brain that can make sense of patterns of this sort will only take input from the ears.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Mon, 09 May 2011 14:40:37 +0000

There’s problems with any method of representing an auditory experience as a visual one. Any translation will lose something in the process.

By: demian

demian — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:54:01 +0000

Surely you can see the problem of using musical scores to attempt to turn an auditory experience into a visual one? Aside from the fact that the score doesn’t contain information for the quality of each tone, the main patterns of relationships between the notes are represented largely in symbolic form rather than in absolute form. For example, the physical space between two notes on the score does not tell you precisely how far apart they really are in terms of semi-tones. A flat or sharp symbol may be placed next to them to modify the distance. Thus our brain has to do extra work to translate the symbols on the score into the actual pattern. Perhaps some people can do this quickly enough to experience the pattern as they would a recording but it would take much training; far more than that required for sight-reading.

By: Dylan

Dylan — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 16:46:29 +0000

A lot of times, the “visuals” I experience are those from when I had my most memorable hearing of the song. If I hear “Seether” by Veruca Salt (or pretty much anything off the Tank Girl Soundtrack) I think of the brick buildings in downtown St. Louis. “That Old Wind” by Garth Brooks makes me see US 27 passing by my windshield in Florida which I’d driven quite a bit with that CD playing. Hearing a song generally combines with the visuals I am experiencing and imprints it on my mind. Fall on Your Sword’s “Shatner of the Mount” will inevitably bring up visuals of the Marriott Atrium Ballroom with people loaded in for the Patrick Stewart panel (even more so than the Nimoy-Shatner panel, but that’s likely because I was pretty nervous prior to Nimoy-Shatner and wasn’t really paying a lot of attention to anything besides “Don’t screw up”

There are some songs, however, that I experience in different ways for reasons I’m not entirely clear on. When I first heard “Sadness” by Enigma I clearly saw the music video I would make for the song. I make music videos from time to time and have to be inspired by a song and movie combination (eg. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to put together Sia’s Breathe Me with The Abyss?”, “Wouldn’t it be awesome to match Fight Club with Ministry’s N.W.O.?”, etc.), but this is typically only for songs that really resonate with me. It appears there’s a hierarchy of songs: songs I don’t remember; songs I associate with a specific time and a place; and songs that impose themselves on my consciousness to the point I feel the need to do something creative with them.

But my experiences are solely concerned with pre-existing music, not the creation of new music along with the accompanying visuals. . . probably because I can process individual elements and figure out how they go together easier for visual things than I can for audio things. I have to think I’m primarily a visual thinker and internally represent sound as images. Probably because of too much MTV rotting my brain.

By: Pop

Pop — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:08:45 +0000

Geof, I don’t think that’s weird at all. I find that I’m visual in some aspects, but not particularly so in others. I can’t help wondering if the degree to which we visualize in particular fields rises from our introduction and early experience with that field, or perhaps our experiences over time. Kinda like the commercial in which the composer sits at the piano with–what, composer’s block?–until he notices birds on telephone wires and riffs on the theme they visually represent by their positions on the wires.

By: links for 2009-09-30 | GFMorris.com

links for 2009-09-30 | GFMorris.com — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 02:31:28 +0000

[...] Visualizing Music | Live Granades (tags: gfmorris_comment) [...]

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:21:30 +0000

Am I weird in that, while generally being a visual person, I don’t try to visualize music at all?

By: Stephen

Stephen — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:13:23 +0000

Jeff: that'd be Michael Gondry's video for Star Guitar, by the Chemical Brothers.