Introduction to Computer Media

ICM Week 9: Final Project Proposal--Visualizing Music

visualizing music

  • a visual animation that can change along with a song(the volume and the frequency).

How did I become interested in it?

  • I like listening to music very much. I always wear my headphones when I'm in the subway, and when I'm doing my homework. Music always calms me down and helps me focus on my mind. And when I was thinking what to do in my final project, I listened a song named "already home" by A Great Big World(a band in New York City). This is one of my favorite song. The lyrics really got into my head. One of the lyrics said "If only New York wasn't so far away, I promise the city won't get in our way ". I started to visualize the song, the picture of new york city, the street, as well as the sound wave of the piano. So I think it would be interesting to visualize a song using processing.

Who is the audience?

  • the people who like listening music and like to picture the lyric and the melody.

Something visual for us to look at in class: drawings, images, video, etc.

  • First of all, I want to create a processing sketch that changes according to the song's volume and frequency. Here's some music visualization from iTunes. These are several light planets and many particles. It's very beautiful when you see it changing along with the music.

Screen Shot 2014-11-11 at 7.28.45 AM Screen Shot 2014-11-11 at 7.28.29 AM

  • secondly, I want to add related pictures in the sketch by using the google image API. I want to divide the screen into two similar pictures to express the story in the song. Below are some pictures from MV "already home". It seems the boy lives in California and the girl lives in the New York City.

Screen Shot 2014-11-11 at 8.03.29 AM

A sample Processing sketch that demonstrates a first step

Screen Shot 2014-11-11 at 11.03.28 AM

Questions for the class (conceptual or technical)

  • how to make visualization like iTunes did? or other visualization ideas?
  • do I need to cover all the songs, so people can search one song and play it, or focus on one particular song, to make the animation and pictures matching the melody very well?
  • do I need to add some lyrics into the animation?

Things I need to do:

  • make better visualization.
  • add pictures, use google image API, generate the pictures, divide the screen into two and put two similar pirctures.
  • make the sketch interactive. Users can press some keys to change the animation, or they can add pictures into the animation as background by themselves and create their own MV. for example:

           The [+] and [-] keys allow you to progressively Increase or Decrease the intensity of the particles.

           The [A] and [S] keys let you Add or Subtract particles to the visualizer you are currently viewing.

           The [R] key will Reset the intensity and particle count to their default values.