Live Spectrogram
Re-Inspired by the awesome artistic works in Resonance the Film, a TED talk on generative music videos, and then remembering the good ol’ days of MilkDrop magic, I found myself captivated and wanting to learn more about music visualization and how I could create my own.
Since I will be using Processing for the first time this semester in my computer graphics class, I chose to jump start my learning by exploring music visualization in the language Processing. Doing some very minor research on the subject of music visualization, I discovered that spectrograms are pretty neat and simple to program.
So, starting with a base spectrogram application by Dan Ellis, I started modifying his “LiveSpectrogram” Processing code and created my own version. My changes include: HSV color mode, mp3 file chooser dialog, code cleanup and code optimizations. There is much more to be done, but this is a good start that already looks pretty cool.
While nothing special or original, this is a fun side project that will grow into better things as I find the time. Here are some screen shots of my simple Processing app in action, playing two different Black Moth Super Rainbow songs, enjoy!
Sample Images
The 2 above = “Milk Skates” | The 2 below = “Forever Heavy“
I just find it so neat to watch and attempt to understand the patterns that form while listening!
Again, it’s nothing fancy, but I found this app to be a nice and fun intro into the world of algorithmically generating visualizations for songs. There is a lot more to be done here, and I’m way far behind the latest and greatest, but I’ll try to make more updates for fun as free time allows…
Download!
* Source code ****
Update (9/25/11):
How cool and clever – a circular spectrogram!
Update (11/20/12):
Tweaked colors a bit, now wit more RED!…
Update (12/13/12):
—-> Converted this to HARDWARE with an Arduino! <—-