Piano music visualized on a logarithmic spiral

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWmTg3bHwuw

by icey • 16 years ago

92 17 16 years ago

The music itself is perhaps best known from the Academy Award winning (best cartoon, 1946) Tom and Jerry cartoon, "The Cat Concerto"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWGQaczNL5I

boredguy8• 16 years ago

Personally, I love the "Music Animation Machine" visualizations, especially of Bach.

Toccata and Fugue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o

"Little" Fugue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVadl4ocX0M

Also enjoyable: Debussy's Clair de lune http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvUepMa31o

TheTarquin2• 16 years ago

Very cool links! Thanks for sharing. These bar-graph visualizations remind me of Gregorian notation for some reason.

RevRal• 16 years ago

Those links are great since really help you to "see" the relativity notes, which is one reason I like to experiment with my music notation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_scores

*Here you can read more about Solitude, that crazy looking graphic at the top of the wiki article: http://at.or.at/hans/solitude/

frankus• 16 years ago

What's neat about the OP's video is that it shows the "periodicity" of the various octaves.

Back in college (1996 or so -- it was on one of the first PowerPC macs) I put together an animation for a class project that was sort of a combination of the two using Bach's Invention #13.

The view was of traveling down a tunnel of a sort of swirly green fog. Each note was represented by a little yellow or magenta stripe painted on the inside of the tunnel, based on which "part" (i.e. hand) was playing it. The angular position was determined by the pitch (which wrapped around at each octave), and the length of the stripe was determined by the duration of the note. All in all it was a really effective way of visualizing the song.

I wish I would've videotaped it, because the source code is long gone and wouldn't run on modern hardware anyway.

eru2• 16 years ago

> I wish I would've videotaped it, because the source code is long gone and wouldn't run on modern hardware anyway.

Emulation could have worked.

eru2• 16 years ago

It's too sad the region where Bach (and I!) lived does not produce such outstanding musicians any longer.

TheTarquin2• 16 years ago

Cool! This is a great way to visualize the relationship of notes in a chord. One of the harder things to teach in beginning music theory are chord forms, since it requires thinking relatively, rather than absolutely. Major and minor chords are related together not because of the notes themselves, but because of the intervals between them.

In this visualization, though, all the related chords are roughly the same shape. Seems like it'd be a great way to harness visual thinking to teach a more abstract concept.

Very cool!

chipsy• 16 years ago

Two-dimensional keyboard layouts mostly use regular chord shapes. It makes both theory and playability come a lot more easily - two fingerings per scale and chord, no adjustments for different keys. I own an Axis 49 and while I'll admit it isn't perfect for existing repertoire, it excels in every other respect. If you want to "learn music" this is the fastest way to do it.

zokier• 16 years ago

Isn't that a normal, not logarithmic, spiral?

icey• 16 years ago

My title is probably a little inaccurate. The frequencies decrease logarithmically as you move outward on the spiral.

gwern• 16 years ago

I wonder how playable a spiral pyramid version of that would be; I've long thought that a long line must be a suboptimal piano layout (like a single long alphabetic row would be bad for typing).

caryme• 16 years ago

If you find this interesting, you might want to check out the Topic 7 lecture notes from Bryan Pardo's Machine Perception of Music and Audio course at Northwestern University: http://music.cs.northwestern.edu/courses/eecs352/lectures.ph...

Those notes show an example of a spiral pitch representation and discuss chromagrams (mapping complex wave forms to pitch classes) as well as other concepts.

For a deeper look, check out the book Signals Sound and Sensation by William M. Hartmann.

speek• 16 years ago

I wonder if visualizing this kind of data can help people find what makes "popular" or "good" music.

nopinsight• 16 years ago

If someone can create an instrument arranged in this form, it might help a great deal with music education.

Dejen45• 16 years ago

Very hip visualization, reminiscent of integer notation (c=0, c#=1, d=2, etc) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_notation

Music educators are slowly finding ways to catch up traditional pedagogy with the ever-expanding technologies.

some color coating would even help younger players.

fantastic work

briancooley• 16 years ago

This one is my favorite, for obvious reasons: http://www.youtube.com/watch#v=oDUyz8lGw58&feature=relat...

Piano music visualized on a logarithmic spiral

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