Music visualization

Print screen of preset included in MilkDrop version 1.04d

Music visualization, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and synchronized with the music as it is played.

Visualization techniques range from simple ones (e.g., a simulation of an oscilloscope display) to elaborate ones, which often include a plurality of composited effects. The changes in the music's loudness and frequency spectrum are among the properties used as input to the visualization.

History

The Atari Video Music. The unit never gained enough popularity and was in production for only a year.

The first electronic music visualizer was the Atari Video Music introduced by Atari Inc. in 1976, and designed by the initiator of the home version of Pong, Robert Brown. The idea was to create a visual exploration that could be implemented into a Hi-Fi stereo system. It is described in US 4081829 .

Music and audio players were available on early home computers, Sound to Light Generator (1985, Infinite Software) used the ZX Spectrum's cassette player for example.^[1] The 1984 movie Electric Dreams prominently made use of one, although as a pre-generated effect, rather than calculated in real-time. One of the first modern music visualization programs was the open-source, multi-platform Cthugha (1994). Subsequently, computer music visualisation became widespread in the mid to late 1990s as applications such as Winamp (1997), Audion (1999), and SoundJam (2000). By 1999, there were several dozen freeware non-trivial music visualizers in distribution.

In particular, MilkDrop by Ryan Geiss, G-Force by Andy O'Meara, and Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS) by Nullsoft became popular music visualizations. AVS is part of Winamp and has been recently open-sourced, and G-Force was licensed for use in iTunes^[2] and Windows Media Center^{[citation needed]} and is presently the flagship product for Andy O'Meara's software startup company, SoundSpectrum. The real distinction between music visualization programs such as Geiss' MilkDrop and other forms of music visualization such as music videos or a laser lighting display is the visualization programs' ability to create different visualizations for each song every time the program is run.

List of electronic music visualizers

• Atari Video Music, designed by the initiator of the home version of Pong, Robert Brown, and introduced by Atari Inc. in 1976.
• Pixelmusic 3000,^[3] open source music visualizer on a microcontroller, made by Uncommon Projects in 2008.^[4]

List of music visualization software

• Cthugha (Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt, 1993)
• Rabbit Hole (2001 version for Sonique , 2011 port for the App Store (iOS))
• Advanced Visualization Studio (Justin Frankel)
• G-Force (2000, Andy O'Meara, SoundSpectrum)
• MilkDrop (2001, Ryan Geiss), an OpenGL implementation, projectM, and a WebGL implementation, milkshake
• Music Animation Machine (MAM, 1985) visualizes MIDI scores, rather than waveforms.^[5]
• MIDIjam, which also visualizes MIDI files, but with three-dimensional instruments rather than two-dimensional graphics.
• Virtual Light Machine (Jeff Minter, 1990)
• Neon (Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin, 2004)
• SONOVISTA™ BiT BOPPER (1993, O'Wonder) ^[6]
• Whip! (1999, Escape)^[7]
• TronMe (2006, 3D Solar)
• Visual Music Tone Painter (1992-2004, Stephen Nachmanovitch)^[8]
• Vsxu (2003, Vovoid)

An early "light synthesizer", Psychedelia (1984, Jeff Minter), did not use audio input but was designed to create visualizations in accompaniment to music.

List of media players supporting visualization

• Foobar2000 (Platform: Windows)
• MediaPortal (OpenSource, Team MediaPortal) (Platform: Windows)
• iTunes (2001, Apple) (Platforms: Mac OS X, Windows)
• Winamp (Nullsoft/AOL) (Platforms: Windows)
• Windows Media Player (Microsoft) (Platforms: Windows)
• MediaMonkey (Ventis Media Inc.) (Platform: Windows)
• MusicBee (Steven Mayall) (Platforms: Windows)
• K-Multimedia Player (Pandora.TV) (Platform: Windows)
• Amarok (Open Source, KDE) (Platform: Linux)
• Totem (Open Source, Gnome) (Platform: Linux)
• Audacious Media Player (Audacious Team) (Platforms: POSIX) ^[9]
• VLC media player (VideoLAN Project) (Platforms: Cross-platform)^[10]

See also

• Clavier à lumières
• Liquid light show
• Video art

• Cymatics
• Libvisual

Notes

1. ^ "Sound to Light Generator". World of Spectrum. http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0018300. Retrieved 2009-02-20. 
2. ^ "About iTunes" - iTunes 8.0.0.35 credits
3. ^ http://digitaltools.node3000.com/blog/183-pixelmusic-3000-visual-nostalgia-from-the-70ies-era
4. ^ http://uncommonprojects.com/site/play/pixelmusic-3000
5. ^ Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (1992). Computing in musicology, Volume 8. ISBN 9780936943060. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RQD0AAAAMAAJ&q=%22music+animation+machine%22&dq=%22music+animation+machine%22&hl=en&ei=W0LuS4rJCMu2_Qaj_fzmBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAQ. 
6. ^ http://www.owonder.com/history/bitbopper/sonovista
7. ^ http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~nf2/projects/projects.html
8. ^ SIGART (2000). Intelligence, new visions of artificial intelligence in practice. 11. Association for Computing Machinery. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=-WZVAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Visual+Music+Tone+Painter%22&dq=%22Visual+Music+Tone+Painter%22&hl=en&ei=akTuS6O1JI-h_AacoezmBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAQ. 
9. ^ "Audacious - Features". http://www.audacious-media-player.org/features. Retrieved 2010-08-28. 
10. ^ "VLC playback Features". http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html. Retrieved 2010-08-28. 

External links

• Laser Harp midi controller for ILDA compliant laser projectors
• Music Visualization: Beautiful Tools to 'See' Sound
• Visual Music Archive by Prof. Dr. Heike Sperling