Music Visualization and Imagination - I

This topic has always been of great interest to me since i was a child. I always wanted to 'see' music, play around with it in my head. I am an amateur in music, but still a little to brag about - My music lessons were also towards this to an extent, they made me think about viewing music to see the scale i sing in, the range i am singing in. But this is too specific to what i really want to talk about here.

Music visualization has been around for ages now - The windows media player has an assortment of these visualizations with the battery mode, the famous graphic EQ mode and many others. There have been interesting history to such visualizations(please do take a look at the external links on Visual Music). There is a certain appreciation we gain in looking at these images when we listen to music. It reflects many things in my opinion - it shows the involvement in the music in many levels.

There can be a direct correlation one sees to notes, rhythm and detail of the music, it shows ones observation in action here and this is something very strong and catchy in a visualization that one sees. There can also be a subconscious drive to the same phenomena, where we associate emotions, reactions and thoughts to the visualization in sync with the music. This is something of field by itself under study, an extreme case of this being synaesthesia, Where one hears music there is a creation of a visual cue, or vice versa. This very interesting phenomenon underlies according to me a fundamental effect when one hears music - We experience in various levels what the effect of music and towards this blogposts idea, an visual representation of what one hears.

Lets have an example of what i am talking about, this is one of my favourites from this site called musanim (music animation).

Vivaldi - Allegro




Nothing Else matters (flute)

These two examples were very indicative of how the visualizations here are made to remark the location of notes, relative displacements, tempo, and in some coarse sense the structure of the song.

Try this abstract one out by floyd..

This is more towards the pyscadelia side of visualizations where ones imagination is just about taking over to see some sense in the visualization.

To build a few bridges - Remember this from Ratatouille ?

This represents close to what i want to depict with the previous 2 examples - Remi here tastes cheese, strawberries and other distinctive snacks around, with particular visualizations being show next to him, this as we see produces in some sense a visualization of the taste and gives a more deep understanding (more information basically) to the viewer appreciate the taste that Remi experiences in his mouth.

Similarly when it comes to music there are distinctive flurry of thoughts that conjure up a unique feel to the rhythm, notes, details of the music, and at the most abstract level emotions (dips and drives) in the song. Different textures in different dimensions of the song can be seen. This is something that the we contribute to more than the video. This makes the experience a lot more enjoyable (at times). I shall continue on the same in the next blog post and talk about how our creative imagination plays a role in enjoying as well as most importantly create great music !!

We see a lot of these videos and visualizations used profusely in Trance, Hip Hop, House, And variants of these genres - what drives the visualizations is the idea of making the experience a lot more perceptive than just hearing, listening, and dancing.

This is something random i picked to help see the visualization and its effect on how a viewer associates with it - different people respond to it in different ways. Associations with words, with music are something that i shall i again address in the near future, but the primary discussion here is how music (without all of its anatomy specifically lyrics) limited in form - affects and effects us in an unlimited way.

Tracid:

Ravi