The Hyperinstruments group is exploring new ways to visualize music both at the song-level and at the collection-level.
Song-level: soundsieve is a music visualizer that takes the intrinsic qualities of a musical piece – pitch, time, and timbre – and makes their patterns readily apparent in a visual manner. For example, you can quickly pick out repeating themes, chords, and complexity from the pictures and video.
Collection-level: MusicBox focuses on the problem of navigating a large body of music. It aims to help you find music you like, both inside your own collection (to match a particular mood, for example), or from a body of entirely new music. MusicBox visualizes your music collection in space, giving each track a location based on how similar it sounds to other tracks. This new manner of navigation stands in stark contrast to traditional, text-dependent media players like iTunes and Windows Media Player.
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