What does music look like? With new sounds and new technologies, the question is more apt than ever. Tom of Music thing points, via his Twitter feed, to this interesting post regarding Ligeti’s Artikulation:

Visualizing Artikulation [Bad Assembly]

Music notation takes on a different meaning in the age of computers. After all, the essential divide in notation – between sound representation and realization – is blurred in the digital domain, in which we move between visual and sonic information seamlessly and a sound can be reproduced exactly. But, perhaps in that fluid context and without the musical conventions that grew up with notation, the importance of notation becomes that much clearer.

In this case, the classic experimental electronic composition Artikulation by composer György Ligeti has already had a visual score associated with it. Rainer Wehinger created the visuals above after the fact as an “aural score,” intending visuals to present a visible “reading” of the sounds of the piece. That makes the score itself closer to the digital visualizations we see as motion graphics works all over the Web (and on our sister site Create Digital Motion). The point isn’t to create a set of instructions by which you can perform a piece, but a visual counterpart that allows you to (presumably) hear it differently.

To be honest, I’m not always certain what to make of these results. Does this score really help you hear the piece? I’m curious to hear different reactions. But I wonder if the real holy grail comes back to software and interface. Seeing a pre-composed score is already interesting. But make that score interactive, and, in short, you have music creation software. Perhaps we’ll get beyond simple sequencers and step sequencers and start to see a growing number of interactive software designs that play around with that concept. (See Tom’s other thoughts on that today as he looks to Audio Damage’s new Automaton plug-in.)

Side Note: Twittering

If you want to follow us music bloggers on Twitter, I’m (uncreatively) peterkirn; Tom Whitwell is tombola. FriendFeed for me is the same. I haven’t made a CDM Twitter account; if for some reason that interested you, let me know, but otherwise I’m inclined to think RSS is just fine.

And if you have Twitters/FriendFeeds you think I should follow, please do holler.

Labels and artists are only now catching on to the idea of letting fans remix their music, and are even slower to give those fans access to individual stems. But where musicians have embraced this idea, they’ve gotten surprisingly big outpourings of support — thank a culture that’s gotten savvy with digital music tools and consumes more music than ever.

While that change continues to spread slowly, though, audiovisual remixing could already have a jump start.

Here’s a brief video snippet I discovered someone took at a talk I did at this year’s South by Southwest, with interaction design pioneer Joy Mountford (formerly Yahoo, Apple). We were talking about the idea of “data as art”, which happened to coincide neatly with the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MOMA, featuring several works from Joy’s recently-disbanded Design Innovation Group team at Yahoo.

The audience response to the work Joy showed was really overwhelming, as search activity danced around the globe and photos came to life in three dimensions. And it was nice to be able to show them the tool used to create these projects, Processing, and encourage people to try it out for free, even if they hadn’t tried programming before.

But I was surprised by how people reacted to a quick musical demo I closed with. Using Java, I wrote a simple program that checked my Gmail account using IMAP, then translated the time spam messages arrived into MIDI notes. I’m still developing a more advanced real-time version, so I threw the resulting SMF file into Ableton Live.

I’ll actualy be showing a newer version of this for Internet Week at an event sponsored by Make Magazine; more on that in a few days. (I’ll also use that as an opportunity to post some updated code.)

We spend so much time talking about how visualization can make data more expressive that we sometimes overlook other media. The spam “musicification” made sense to people partly because even the untrained ear is sensitive to musical timing, I think. Sonification of data isn’t always the right choice; the results can be abstract, though perhaps there’s value in that, too. But it’s worth remembering that people are sensitive to sound as they are to visuals. Since it’s not an either/or choice, necessarily, it’s too bad that so often designers neglect aspects of sound and timing while focusing only on what something looks like. It’s a challenge, certainly — there’s a reason most of us mute annoying sound feedback on computer interfaces — but I think it’s an area in which we’ll see a lot more discussion.

Now, data in smell-o-vision — that’s a story for another day.

Everything has an “API” these days, but what that means in practice is often not so exciting. You can make little widgets for Facebook, or post recent Twitter messages, or do other simple developer tricks. Echo Nest’s “Musical Brain” API is more far-reaching: it’s an API for music. All music online. The first of a series of developer tools, “Analyze” is designed to describe music the way you hear it, figuring out tempo, beats, time signature, song sections, timbre, key, and even musical patterns. More developer tools will follow.

Twelve years in development, the Musical Brain is a bit like a digital music blogger. It’s been crawling the Web while you sleep, reading blog posts, listening to music to extract musically-meaningful attributes, and even predicting music trends. It’s like almost like a robotic, algorithmic Pitchfork. (And I’m serious — it may be April Fools’ Day, but this is real. That’s what the “brain” claims to do, backed by research at UC Berkeley, Columbia, and MIT.)

What does all of this mean? The Musical Brain may not be replacing your friendly local music blog any time soon, but what it can do is infuse some musical intelligence into applications like music visualization. The Matmos album at top used the Analyze algorithm to map the timbral profiles of songs on an upcoming album; that graph was then rendered by an artist in watercolor, translating the digital into traditional paint media.

The Analyze API could also enable everything from Web music apps and mash-ups to live audiovisual performance tools, or even smarter music games. That’s the reason co-creators Brian Whitman and Tristan Jehan, both with PhDs from the MIT Media Lab, chose to open up development to a broad audience. I got to speak to Brian a bit about the project.

Any CDM readers who live in Chicago should check this out- it’s a weeklong festival exploring/celebrating sound design, motion graphics, and the overlapping regions occupied by both.

In addition to the week’s worth of discussions and skillsharing classes, there will be two “showcase” nights, Saturday Jan. 19th and Sunday Jan. 20th. For those interested, I will be exhibiting two audiosculptural pieces, Octophonopod and Snowy Day during the event on Saturday. There’s a riduculous amount of talent on both nights, amounting to some of the most fresh and innovative people working in sound and motion graphics today.

[- Michael Una]