Soundsieve is a music visualizer created by Anita Lillie at the MIT Media Lab. The music browser plays mp3 files along with a visual representation of each song's pitch, time and timbre. Watch a video of it in action here.
Below is a Soundsieve visualization by Anita Lillie of one of my noisy Thingamagoop synth tracks, "I Will." The audio quality is poor in this compressed low-res mono version on youtube. It's interesting to see how the software tracks the atonal noise. The song + video are available here.
tj milian : i will [soundsieve mono] for iphone [22 MB]
The precursor to Soundsieve, Visualizing Music, was written in python using pygame.
Time is mapped to the horizontal axis, just as you'd expect. The piece has been broken up into a series of irregularly-sized segments (that are usually about 0.1 to 0.3 seconds long), and those are the vertical slices that you see scrolling past.Soundsieve can output video and still images of the music visualizations. The software is not available at this time, and there has been no announcement of a future release yet.
Each one of those vertical slices is chopped up into twelve pitches along the vertical axis; these correspond to the twelve semitones in an octave (the chromatic scale). Along the left side of the screen, you can see that each of these chunks is labelled with the corresponding note on a scale. Note that all pitches are compressed into one octave, so notes that are an octave apart appear as the same pitch on the vertical axis. Another result of this is that, series of notes that "run off" the top of the visual space loop back around to the bottom of the space, and vice versa.
Each vertical slice is colored with an RGB value corresponding to the timbre of the sound in that segment. Timbre is what makes, say, a saxophone sound different than a trumpet. The hope here is that the color will capture enough of the variability so that this statement is true: The sounds that sound similar will appear similar in color.
Larger image here.
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