Sarah Kang-Looking Outwards-07

In this project, “The Shape of Song”, artist Martin Wattenberg demonstrates his explorations of trying to “see” musical form. I was intrigued by this project because adding a dimension of visual sense allows one to experience and interpret music in a brand new way. To achieve this experiment, Wattenberg created a visualization program that highlights the repeated verses in music using translucent arcs, called an “arc diagram”. This software, written entirely in Java. analyzes “MIDI” files of the musical piece which are commonly found on the web. Using this information, an arc connects a pair of identical sections of a musical piece. The arcs seem to be proportionally sized in terms of the spacing of the repeated sections. This allows the piece to be viewed in terms of its structure, rather than sound. The visualizations created by Wattenberg allow the viewer to analyze the entire musical piece as one visual composition in a matter of seconds, as opposed to the minutes it would take to listen to the entire song.

http://bewitched.com/song.html