Week 3 February 11, 2008
Posted by bperdue in : Uncategorized , trackbackOkay, so this week I wanted to post several resources I’ve found so far, but then my hard drive ceased to function. I had a few things on there that I haven’t been able to find again. I’ll post them when I come across them. Meantime, I’ve still got a fair number of resources which I had hard copies of, and which I was able to find online again, so I’ll go ahead and talk about those in brief.
The following papers are all from a special issue of ACM Computers in Entertainment. The contents of that entire issue can be accessed through the ACM Digital Library here.
Krumhansl, Carol L. “The Geometry of Musical Structure: A Brief Introduction and History.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 14 pages.
This paper opened the special issue, and so set some serious music theory background for the reader so that he/she could better comprehend the later papers which deal directly with specific music visualizations. Most of this article dealt with music theory and past, non-computer visualizations, and explained a lot of music theory concepts (like the circle of fifths). Admittedly, I didn’t find it to be the best introduction to such material for the uninitiated; I am still substantially fuzzy on parts of the theory involved, a problem which I shall endeavor to remedy in the near future.
Toiviainen, Petri. “Visualization of Tonal Content with Self-Organizing Maps and Self-Similarity Matrices.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 10 pages.
This paper deals directly with a specific visualization. I admit to not completely understanding some of the math behind the concepts at work here, but basically this visualization maps the tonal content of a piece of music (in MIDI format) in real-time, and color-codes tones according to how similar they are (largely, I think, based upon the key of the piece). The visualization itself - specifically what the colors mean - wasn’t very well explained. The good news is that there are videos with the paper for the three case studies discussed in the paper. I’m having a little trouble getting them uploaded on the school terminal here, but once I get my computer up and running again (hopefully tomorrow), I’ll try to add those files in with this post. If you can’t wait, you can find the files via the above link, in the “supplements” section for this paper.
Chew, Elaine and Alexandre R. J. Francois. “Interactive Multi-scale Visualizations of Tonal Evolution in MuSA.RT Opus 2.” ACM Computers in Entertainments 3.4 (October 2005): 16 pages.
Like the above paper, this one describes a specific visualization, specifically that used in the MuSA.RT program (whcih stands for “Music on the Spiral Array, Real-Time”). This visualization uses, oddly enough, a structure called the spiral array, which is another manner of modeling the proximity of tones to each other. As tones are played (via, say, a keyboard, again in MIDI format), the visualization changes in real-time, showing the path of the music and highlighting various tonal properties which, once again, I think I will understand better once I’ve got a sturdier foundation in music theory. All in all, though, this was a more useful paper than the previous one, because the concepts were explained much more clearly. It, too, includes videos for each of its three case studies (these case studies are done with the same three pieces of classical music as Toiviainen’s paper, so it might be enlightening to compare the two), and I’ll try to upload those in the next few days.
I’ve looked at material regarding the spiral array before. You can see some other material on the MuSA project here.
That’s what I’ve been able to recover thus far. I’m trying to track down a few other references I looked at a couple of weeks ago, but the above references have definitely been the most pertinent and helpful anyway. Things should run more smoothly again when I’ve got my own computer back on-line, especially if I can retrieve stuff from my old hard drive (which, by the way, if anyone knows how/has the stuff necessary to save data from a dead hard drive, I’d appreciate the help; I’ve backed up a lot of my important files elsewhere, but there’s still definitely stuff I’d rather not lose).
Meanwhile, I’ve also taken several more Second Life classes, mostly on Scripting, and I’m keeping an eye out for useful ones when I have the chance.
Total time worked since last post: Approx. 5 hours
Comments»
This might help with your hard drive problem:
http://www.runtime.org/
So kind of a random question, but do you know anything about how the standard visualizations in windows media player work? If i had to guess i would think you could probably find some info about them since wmp is so widely used. Just an idea, don’t know how helpful it is or isn’t.