

Piano music visualized on a logarithmic spiral - icey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWmTg3bHwuw

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boredguy8
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>

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frankus
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.

~~~
eru
> 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.

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TheTarquin
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!

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chipsy
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.

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RiderOfGiraffes
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>

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caryme
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...](http://music.cs.northwestern.edu/courses/eecs352/lectures.php)

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.

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Dejen45
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

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

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

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gwern
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).

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

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

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

