Author Archives: jamesng123

To add user input to my visualisation tool I am using ControlP5. The source code can be found here: http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/controlP5/. Using controlP5 I have added a slider to control the volume of the program. To make sure it controlled the volume properly I used the map() function to ensure it mapped to the setGain() functionContinue reading “Adding User Input”

After my initial attempt at visualising music, I had only used FFT and the audio waveform. I still hadn’t incorporated any beat detection and the visuals looked quite flat and the movement was not smooth enough to really see what was happening. I knew that I didn’t want to move away from FFT since thatContinue reading “More Visualisations”

The main use cases for this tool I can think of can be broken in to three categories: Education Commercial Healthcare EducationMy initial thoughts for this project were that it could be used in an educational setting. I think if the visuals from the music are clear and the correlation is obvious it could beContinue reading “Thoughts on Use Cases”

Tempo is defined by Cambridge Dictionary as “the speed at which a piece of music is played” and is measured in beats per minute. Tempo is usually what is trying to be followed when detecting a beat; this is relatively easy for humans to do by ear but seemingly challenging to be performed by aContinue reading “Beat Detection”

Having played with some of the examples from Processing, my first attempt started with me revisiting the examples. Namely “FFTSpectrum” and “AudioWaveform” (Examples > Libraries > Sound > Analysis). I then began to change some of the features of the example, changing the colours of the blocks depending on their reading from the .analyze() method.Continue reading “First Attempt at Visualising Music”

Sean Smith and Glen Williams, both from Texas A&M University wrote about visualising music in “A Visualization of Music”. Published in 1997, they introduce the subject by stating that music notation is the most popular form of visualising method at the time. They then go on to propose their own method of visualising music thatContinue reading “A Visualization of Music”

One of the examples included with Processing is the “AudioWaveform” program. In this program, it plays a sound and maps the waveform of the audio file. I loaded my own song in to the program. Firstly, I changed the colour of the wave to fit the HSB colour mode. This was done using the colorMode()Continue reading “Experimenting with Processing Examples”

For the first part I took a twelve step color wheel and superimposed it over a circle of fifths… Jack Ox Jack Ox writes on the analysis of music, in “A Complex System for the Visualization of Music”, that the approach when analysing music can also comedown to whether a piece of music can beContinue reading “A Complex System for the Visualization of Music”

This is the simplest method I have found to load an .mp3 file which is located in a directory called “data” which can be found in the same directory as the Processing sketch. The examples included with Processing show how these audio files can be manipulated.

This was done using VSDC which was some freeware I found for video editing. It has an “audio abstraction” tool but I don’t think that has any correlation to the actual music. The “spectrum” tool gives the bar effects that you can see and that is clearly correlated to the music. This reminds me ofContinue reading “Music Visualisation Tools”