Post 40- CD Covers

The system of symbols would ideally be placed in contexts where people make decisions about what music to listen to. Above are some designs for physical format sleeves.

The proportion of symbol to name is intended to facilitate music exploration as the hierarchy would mean that the first object seen by the audience would be the symbol, which may serve draw attention from certain tried and trusted names and towards the visualised song.

In-keeping with my guideline that the music should determine the visual it follows a minimal design, aimed at presenting the symbol with as few visual distractions as possible.

Tracks with similar sound symbols are shown to the track symbolised on the sleeve to further encourage music exploration.

Post 39- Poster

One of my final pieces, a poster which demonstrates how the symbols can be used to compare and contrast various songs. This poster would be available at festivals where people could use it to help them explore new music as key tracks by a selection of the artists playing smaller stages (or up-and-coming artists) are visualised alongside a reference point of several well-known tracks by the headline acts. I chose to use this year's Bestival to provide the example festival because of its reputation for featuring an abundance of artists from an eclectic range of genres in addition to the big names.

The poster, like the other contexts in which the symbols appear, is devised upon the principle that the music dictates the visual. This is especially apparent in the layout which has the symbols grouped/organised by key and tempo (with higher tempo tracks on the right and slower ones on the left and the keys descending down the page)

Exporting the poster from the original vectors to a print-friendly format was a logistical hurdle as the shapes would gain extra, non existent details when exported to .pdf or .eps formats, with the final versions of anything using the symbols eventually needing to be saved as .jpegs to appear as they did on screen.

Post 38 - Playlist Visualisation

Above is a demonstration of how the symbols can be divided and reassembled to form a representation of multiple tracks played sequentially. It could be used to visualise how albums, playlists and mixes flow. It could be especially useful to Dj's who use tempo and key to assemble their sets.

Post 37- TW Cen

The typeface Twentieth Century (abbreviated to Tw Cen in font menus) is used as the typeface to accompany the symbols wherever they are used. As a solid, geometrically formed face it accords well with the aesthetic of the symbols and, to my eye, somehow seems to have fewer of the quirks (if you ignore the some of the counters in the lowercase characters in the regular weight) that can make similar faces like Futura and Gill Sans jarring in places.

Being minimal in nature, it also fits in with the ethos of the system that the sound is the defining force that shapes the visuals. If I were to use an ornate, or heavily idiosyncratic typeface, the type would become too much of a defining feature in itself.

Post 36- Semiotic Theory

The framework of Semiotics is helpful in explaining the intended use of my visual system for music due to the way it helps us understand how people derive and order meaning from different stimuli.

The symbols themselves are intended to serve as indexical signs. This type of sign was first described by Charles Peirce and denotes something that is indicative of something else. The most commonly used example is of smoke as an indexical sign of fire.

In the context of my visual system, the symbols are generated by the properties of the sound and thus certain patterns, combinations and structures that appear within them can be read as indexical signs of certain types of music.

On the Bestival Poster, the symbol for the song How Far (2 Bears Remix) by Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs (below) contains a distinct repeated pattern of colour. Somebody who viewed this symbol and subsequently listened to the track would learn the connection between this patterned symbol and the dancey, electronic music and would be able to measure other visuals against this reference point and gradually acquire an idea of what style of symbol indicates what type of sound.

The indicative nature of the system (five key attributes define the look of each symbol so it does not wholly describe each track) is conducive to intuitive guessing of what things might sound like and acts like a rough guide for an educated exploration of music where the listener isn't influenced to receive the music in a certain way by superfluous marketing and branding.

Post 35- Tweaks

In my attempts to create the final set of symbols to demonstrate the visual system it became clear that the rule needed to be honed to produce symbols that were readable (in the sense of making clear the data from songs) and that, from feedback on some of the first iterations, some kind of device was required to designate clearly, the beginning and end of each song.


The first rule I used produced some symbols that were too dark to be able to make sense of the inherent patterns and structure in the song. The base colour is also obscured by the cloudy layer above it.

Attempt to remedy the problem of base colour being obscured by framing the symbol with base colour (on a different symbol). The top layer (sound levels information) is still quite murky, indistinct.

Changed the rule so that sound levels are expressed within a lower range of top layer opacity levels. This creates greater contrast and makes patterns and structure much clearer and allows the base colour to become more visible.

Symbol with amended data range and an early attempt at showing where the song starts. This is overbearing and dominates the subtle shades that describe the data.

This disrupts the symmetry and and essential shape of the symbol too much.

This is more harmonious with the shape yet still distinct enough to delineate the start/end.

The frame was removed as it was kind of an unnecessary distraction from the data as the small circle in the middle shows the pure base colour.  

Post 34- The Mathematics of Electronic Music

This concise, beginner-friendly essay by Peter Elsea was useful in helping me understand more of the technical aspects of music analysis. The below illustration included in it really was worth a thousand words in explaining sine waves and Fourier transforms, not the most artistically drawn piece of work but exceptional use of metaphor to elucidate an idea that seems esoteric when described only in words.

In addition, this page on the Adobe Soundbooth help section also explains well, some fundamentals of digital audio.

Post 33- Music Sampler

In undertaking this project, I initially had no idea how I was going to procure the data from music to create the symbols so I met with my friend and aspiring programmer and artist Louis Eguchi seeking advice on how to go about this. Before long, him and his brother Nat (also a programmer and artist, with whom Louis often collaborates) had started writing me a custom application called Music Sampler, which takes measurements of sound levels from .mp3 files at specified intervals and writes them to a spreadsheet. 

This neat app allowed me to be flexible in my experimentation with representing this data, as opposed to an automated generative system. 

View Nat and Louis's blog full of awesome projects (the music drawing app might steal a few minutes off you), random scribbles and good music here and follow them on twitter.

Post 32- Peter Saville

Though I hadn't consciously referenced the work of Peter Saville in creating the visual system, somebody observed that his influence is evident within it and retrospectively I can also see this. This is not surprising however as Saville's fame as a designer is founded on his imagery for various music artists' album covers; imagery which has shaped visual language about music.

My system of symbols is most apparently linked to the key to his coded alphabet adorning the sleeve of New Order's Blue Monday. Though this link is not profound (it is a key to a code, rather than the code in itself and describes the alphabet rather than music), you can draw some parallels between the circular composition, importance of colour and relation to language.

Saville's coded alphabet key and alphabet code implemented on the Blue Monday sleeve.

Post 31- More Final Developments

The rule for the final set of symbols was developed with thought into what the equivalent visual characteristics of the sonic properties I am using are. Instead of trying to exhaustively try to describe the sound with the visual (this can never really be achieved by anything other than the sound itself) the system is intended to be an indicator of its fundamental attributes. The properties I used for my data are: most frequent pitch, most frequent key, mean tempo, dynamic Db information (values taken from the waveform that visualises the song's electronic signal, these are taken at specified time increments and are useful, like the waveform at indicating patterns and rhythms) and song length.

My research into these aspects led me to link the following sonic and visual properties: 

Key (most frequent) = Hue. Hue can be equated to Key as both are known to strongly influence the mood of a piece. I defined 14 separate hue classes for each Key class (C,D,E,F,G,A,B) and their sharps and flats. The frequency of each key corresponds to the frequencies on the spectrum of visible light.

Pitch (most frequent) = Warm or cool shade added to the hue. The higher the frequency of the sound, the higher percentage of blue added to the initial hue. The lower the frequency, the more orange (mix of magenta-yellow) added to the initial hue. This corresponds to the the spectrum of visible light and acts in a similar way to sound as, just as different pitches exist within different key classes, different ranges of hue can contain an array of variations. 

Tempo (Mean BPM) = This is reflected in tint and influences the colour variable for Db values. Tempo generally determines whether a song sounds vivacious, natural, mellow or languid whilst the tint value of a hue can make it seem vibrant, normal, washed out or insipid. A high tempo will result in an untinted hue whilst a slower one will see a greater amount of white added.

Decibel Information = The sound's waveform, measured in decibels against time reveals the sound levels and is a very good indicator of patterns and structure. This is interpreted by my visual system in an opacity mask which takes a dark hue (determined precisely by the tempo; higher tempo songs will generate a more harmonious hue that will help to accentuate the general hue of the symbol, increasing its vibrancy while a slower song generates a more complementary hue that will make the overall colour more cloudy) and makes it opaque or transparent to a certain extent, depending on the Db value measured at that point. Higher values will be have a higher transparency, allowing the brighter hue underneath to come through whilst lower values will be more opaque. This will create a darkened fade out effect as the sound levels drop at the end of a track which will help to create an intuitive marker of the end (and beginning) of the song.    

Length = A patterned edge to the circle shape shows clearly the number of measurements taken during the song, the longer the song, the finer the pattern and more colour detail within the shape. I am considering whether to vary the general size of symbols based on song length in the final piece, I'm not sure how important it is as a factor.

Post 30- Final Developments

Having rejected the blobby, idiosyncratic shapes generated by previous rules, I sought to strip my generative symbols down to something that would allow the user to gauge each sound's proximity to the next. The most immediate way of doing this, used universally to differentiate visual information in contexts such as tube maps, encyclopaedias, filing systems and electronics, is colour coding. Rather than the shape creating the point of difference, I would use the more immediately comparable medium of colour. 

In each symbol, there are a number of segments which correspond to intervals in the song where measurements of sound values are taken, this value determines the colour for that segment. The top image is one I experimented with, whereby changes in tone and bpm over time dictated the change in hue, however I felt that this was too similar to a pie-chart as the hue changes were the most dominant aspect. Giving the symbol a single hue, and communicating the differences in sound values through variations within that hue creates a much more readable visual and, I think, a more pleasing aesthetic.

Post 29- Music Info Resources

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've never played an instrument or studied music so it was necessary to research some of the key terms used to analyse it so that I could understand them enough to consider how to translate them into visual language, below are some of the resources I used to do this:

Explanation of sharp and flat keys

Info on tempo and tempo classes

Clarification of pitch, key and accidentals

Further explanation of key, chords and harmony

Post 28- Robert Corish

An interesting installation by Robert Corish harnessing the physical vibrations of sound to create a projection of fluctuating patterns of coloured light. His site is full of other fascinating generative projects that bridge the gap between art and science.

Post 27- Key and Colour

Simple graphic showing the relationship between colour and key:

Post 26- Key Charter

Charting is a web app that uses data from the Echo Nest (a music analysis company which creates databases to power music applications) to create a simple a infographic that demonstrates the key most used by an artist. This is quite closely related to what I want my system to produce, in that it is very easily comparable. However I do want to represent a little more detail (I will include data from more aspects of the music) and think that the visuals should be more variable and contain some cues to suggest what information is evident in them.

Post 25- Tune Glue

Though it is driven by the algorithms that connect and recommend 'similar' artists that I have previously slated a bit on this blog as a way of finding new music, TuneGlue is well realised and entertaining as a way of presenting proximity between artists.  

Post 24- Musicovery

Although it's pretty impossible to quantify which music suits a given mood or emotion (because what someone will want to listen to whilst in a certain state of mind is entirely subjective), Musicovery is a site with a nice interface that allows you to listen to a host of radio stations matched to 4 distinct moods: Positive, Dark, Energetic and Calm (and the shades of grey in-between).

I think the idea is executed well and you can discern a quite general change in mood of the music when moving the cursor over the grid but, like anything that tries to categorise the mood of music, it is by no means perfect. A case in point is when i scrolled over the bit between 'positive' and 'energetic' and it played Jimi Hendrix's song Manic Depression.

The playful feel of it and ability to seamlessly flit through 117 tracks makes it possible to discover new music but mostly I just end up entertaining myself with it by mashing together death metal and jazz.

This interface is just a single feature of the site however and it does contain a Pandora style 'similar artist radio' but as mentioned before on this blog I don't think these algorithmic recommendation systems are brilliant tools for finding new music.

 

Post 23- Candle In The Dark- Song Length

Found this interesting study into song length that took in data from 70,000 songs and found a strong tendency for the length of songs to be very close to 4 mins in length. Read more at the blog A Candle in the Dark.

Post 22- Jason Bailey - Drawing from Music

I found Jason Bailey's blog when searching for projects that span both music and art and was intrigued by this project whereby he has broken down the digital music file of jazz artist John Coltrane's giant steps into ASCII characters and inputted to a drawing program that creates a series of points on an X/Y axis that are joined up by lines. I've contacted Jason as I'd love to know more about this process and am awaiting reply. 

Post 21- Edward Tufte

Though I am not creating 'infographics' in my system for visualising music, (read the post on Isotype charts) I followed up a reference in Erik Spiekermann's book review (mentioned in the Isotype post) to Edward Tufte.

Tufte is an influential thinker in the field of information design who advocates a selective approach to data-based design with the elimination of any elements that do not contribute to the audience's understanding of the implications of that data (this is summed up by his term, 'chartjunk').

One idea that he is an exponent of, summarised on his Wikipedia page, struck me as being salient in general and particularly relevant to this project:

Tufte also encourages the use of data-rich illustrations with all the available data presented. When examined closely, every data point has value; when seen overall, trends and patterns can be observed. Tufte suggests these macro/micro readings be presented in the space of an eyespan, in the high resolution format of the printed page, and at the unhurried pace of the viewer's leisure

These sound like a good set of guidelines for visualising music, as I think to be able to compare the sounds visually with one another, my symbols will need to be adept at showing overall trends and patterns.

Below is an example of what Tufte brands 'the best statistical graphic ever drawn', a diagram of Napoleon's Russian campaign and subsequent retreat that gives the viewer a laconic insight into the fortunes of the campaign with the width of the line representing the dwindling number of men in his army.

Post 20- Transforming data into human stories

Erik Spiekermann's review of the book The Transformer: The Principles of Making Isotype Charts in Eye magazine makes some pretty pertinent points about the process of encoding data in graphics. The subject of the book he reviews is Otto Neurath's work in developing a style of data presentation which maintained the connection between the actual data being shown and the visual. The principles of Neurath's Isotype charts advocate the tailoring of the visual to the data it is representing to create a piece which can be understood as intuitively as possible. 

Neurath developed the notion of ‘the transformer’, as Robin Kinross writes in his preface, ‘to describe the process of analysing, selecting, ordering, and then making visual some information, data, ideas, implications’.

A crucial difference between my visual system and infographics is that the symbols are not intended to be transcriptions of the absolute music data which you could read a key to understand, rather they are a visual language for comparison and observation to be understood in relation only to one another. 


The arbitrary nature of languages means that the symbols created by my system could take nearly any form, as long as they make differences apparent. 


However, to give the user of the system some clues as to what is being signified in specific differences I will firstly draw on existing visual language and, more importantly, give them some reference points for translation in the form of well-known songs visualised through the system in the contexts in which my symbols will appear.

Post 19- Andy Gilmore Music Art

Andy Gilmore's collection of geometry and music inspired graphics beautifully demonstrate the tacit relationship between the visual arts and music and that the inherent aesthetic arrangements of light or sound can be transferred from one medium to the other and retain its ability to captivate.

   

Post 18- Visual Systems of Difference

Typefaces, maps and flags are all examples of visual languages that make differences within an overall paradigm very apparent and easily fathomable and serve as good reference points for what I aim to create. However, I need to bear the subject- music- in mind when forming the visuals as the aforementioned languages are (mostly) purposely reductive and this is somewhat at odds with the rich, diverse art that is music. Within this dichotomy of richness vs reduction is a balance which needs to be observed in my symbols.

The above typeface is a nice redrawing of Futura I stumbled across on Hetttty's blog, a collection of graphics and illustration by Belfast-based design student Heather Browne. 

Post 17- Software

A key piece of music analysis software I have used to obtain music data in this project is Sonic Visualiser, a free program developed at the Queen Mary University of London. It was developed as a visual aid to help musicologists and signal processing researchers study sound recordings and has many features and plugins that were useful to me such as the waveform generator, key detection and tempo detection. Aside from being useful for this project, it is genuinely interesting to use and exploring the myriad ways in which it can output sound into visuals can easily swallow up an hour.    

Post 16- Visual Testing

If I was to create a system that showed proximity between songs, it would need to have a modular framework within which difference could be expressed. I started to experiment with mapping the data around a circle (which conveniently alludes to a staple of visual language about music- the disc format and simultaneously, a clock, which would allow me to represent values against time in an easily understandable way), using sets of lines radiating out from a centre point with varying lengths to show different values. I tried several variations on this theme and received positive feedback on some of the results. However the capacity for these symbols to show difference was questionable, each one was too blobby, too indistinct which would make difference between them hard to fathom without studying them. 

The system needed to be more immediate and intuitive than this, with the viewer hopefully being able to spot differences instantly.