In recent months I have worked on a new approach for visualising music. Already since a long time I had been dissatisfied with the way that media players show graphics to music: it is often just based on a raw analysis of the audio, showing a spectrogram, and then some random spatial animation. In most cases there is hardly a connection between what is seen on the screen to what the music is actually playing, except that the rhythm of the music is reflected in some of the motion.
But I wanted a visualisation which is true to the music and contains all music elements in it. And I found one: a transformation which is based on a display of the rhythmic (repetitive) properties of the music. My paper about this will be presented in march 2012 at the workshop "Music, Mind, Invention" in Ewing, New Jersey.
Here just a brief summary - details will be seen in the paper: the 2D piano roll plot which is used in music sequencers for showing / editing music notes over a timeline, contains all relevant information about the music. Treating this piano roll plot as an image can then lead to a visualisation which contains all the musical elements - and this transformation is even reversible, so that the visuals can be re-translated into music.
