Screenshot of preset included in MilkDrop, a PC based music visualization software (version 1.04d, 2001)
Music visualization or music visualisation, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and in a way synchronized with the music as it is played.
Visualization techniques range from simple ones (e.g., a simulation of an oscilloscope display) to elaborate ones, which often include a number of composited effects. The changes in the music's loudness and frequency spectrum are among the properties used as input to the visualization.
Effective music visualization aims to attain a high degree of visual correlation between a musical track's spectral characteristics such as frequency and amplitude and the objects or components of the visual image being rendered and displayed.
Definition
Music visualization can be defined, in contrast to previous existing pre-generated music plus visualization combinations (as for example music videos), by its characteristic as being real-time generated. Another possible distinction is seen by some in the ability of some music visualization systems (such as Geiss' MilkDrop) to create different visualizations for each song or audio every time the program is run, in contrast to other forms of music visualization (such as music videos or a laser lighting display) which always show the same visualization. Music visualization may be achieved in a 2D or a 3D coordinate system where up to six dimensions can be modified, the 4th, 5th and 6th dimensions being color, intensity and transparency.
History
The Atari Video Music, available in 1976. The unit never gained enough popularity and was in production for only a year.
The first electronic music visualizer was the Atari Video Music introduced by Atari Inc. in 1977, and designed by the initiator of the home version of Pong, Robert Brown. The idea was to create a visual exploration that could be implemented into a Hi-Fi stereo system.[1] In the United Kingdom music visualization was first pioneered by Fred Judd.
Music and audio players were available on early home computers, Sound to Light Generator (1985, Infinite Software) used the ZX Spectrum's cassette player for example.[2] The 1984 movie Electric Dreams prominently made use of one, although as a pre-generated effect, rather than calculated in real-time.
For PC/DOS one of the first modern music visualization programs was the open-source, multi-platform Cthugha in 1993. In the 1990s the emerging demo and tracker music scene pioneered the real-time technics for music visualization on the PC platform; resulting examples are Cubic player (1994), Inertia Player (1995) or in general their real-time generated Demos.[3][4]
Subsequently, PC computer music visualization became widespread in the mid to late 1990s as applications such as Winamp (1997), Audion (1999), and SoundJam (2000). By 1999, there were several dozen freeware non-trivial music visualizers in distribution. In particular, MilkDrop (2001) and its predecessor "geiss-plugin" (1998) by Ryan Geiss, G-Force by Andy O'Meara, and AVS (2000) by Nullsoft became popular music visualizations. AVS is part of Winamp and has been recently open-sourced,[5] and G-Force was licensed for use in iTunes[6] and Windows Media Center[citation needed] and is presently the flagship product for Andy O'Meara's software startup company, SoundSpectrum. In 2008, iTunes added the "Magnetosphere" visualizer created by The Barbarian Group.[7]
Use by deaf people
There have been applications of electronic music visualization in order to enhance the music listening experience for deaf and hard of hearing people. Richard Burn, a PhD candidate at Birmingham City University, as of 2015, is researching a device that displays detailed visual feedback from electronic instruments. These visuals will provide information on the specifics of what is being played, such as the pitch and the harmonics of the sound. This allows deaf musicians to better understand what notes they are playing, which enables them to create music in a new way.[8]
Researchers from the National University of Singapore have also created a device that seeks to enhance musical experiences for deaf people. This technology combines a music display and haptic chair that integrates sound qualities from music into vibrations and visual images that correlate with the specific qualities found within the music. The visual display shows various shapes that change size, color, and brightness in correlation with the music. Combining this visual display with a haptic chair that vibrates along with the music aims to give a more all-around experience of music to those hard of hearing.[9]
Music visualization can also be used in education of deaf students. The Cooper Union in New York City is using music visualization to teach deaf children about sound. They have developed an interactive light studio in the American Sign Language and English Lower School in New York City. This consists of an interactive wall display that shows digital output created by sound and music. Children can trigger the playing of instruments with their movement, and they can watch the visual feedback from this music. They are also able to view a "talking flower" wall, in which each flower can transform sound into light based on the specific frequencies of the sounds.[10]
List of electronic music visualizers
Atari Video Music, designed by the initiator of the home version of Pong, Robert Brown, and introduced by Atari Inc. in 1976.
Pixelmusic 3000,[11] open source music visualizer on a microcontroller, made by Uncommon Projects in 2008.
Neon (2004, Jeff Minter and Ivan Zorzin) (Platform: Xbox 360)
Psychedelia (1984, Jeff Minter), an early "light synthesizer", did not use audio input but was designed to create visualizations in accompaniment to music.
↑ Nanayakkara, S.; Taylor, E.; Wyse, L.; Ong, S. H. (4 April 2009). "An Enhanced Musical Experience for the Deaf: Design and Evaluation of a Music Display and a Haptic Chair". CHI. doi:10.1145/1518701.1518756. S2CID3185792.
Jeff Minter is an English video game designer and programmer who often goes by the name Yak. He is the founder of software house Llamasoft and has created dozens of games during his career, which began in 1981 with games for the ZX80. Minter's games are shoot 'em ups which contain titular or in-game references demonstrating his fondness of ruminants. Many of his programs also feature something of a psychedelic element, as in some of the earliest "light synthesizer" programs including Trip-a-Tron.
Justin Frankel is an American computer programmer best known for his work on the Winamp media player application and for inventing the Gnutella peer-to-peer network. Frankel is also the founder of Cockos Incorporated, which creates music production and development software such as the REAPER digital audio workstation, the NINJAM collaborative music tool and the Jesusonic expandable effects processor.
Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014, now known as the Llama Group. Since version 2, it has been sold as freemium and supports extensibility with plug-ins and skins, and features music visualization, playlist and a media library, supported by a large online community.
Shoutcast is a service for streaming media over the internet to media players, using its own cross-platform proprietary software. It allows digital audio content, primarily in MP3 or High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding format. The most common use of Shoutcast is for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts; however, there are also video streams. The software is available to use for free or as a paid cloud service with additional professional features.
Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS), is a music visualization plugin for Winamp. It was designed by Winamp creator, Justin Frankel and was first shipped in version 2.0a4 with Winamp 2.61. AVS has a customizable design which allows users to create their own visualization effects, or "presets". AVS was made open source software in May 2005, released under a BSD-style license. AVS is currently at version 2.83 and is included with Winamp, though the distributed version has later been reverted due to compatibility issues. Winamp currently ships with version 2.82 for Windows Vista and 2.81d for older Windows versions.
The following comparison of video players compares general and technical information for notable software media player programs.
M3U is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. One common use of the M3U file format is creating a single-entry playlist file pointing to a stream on the Internet. The created file provides easy access to that stream and is often used in downloads from a website, for emailing, and for listening to Internet radio.
PLS is a computer file format for a multimedia playlist. It is typically used by media players for streaming media over the Internet, but may also be used for playing local media.
MilkDrop is a hardware-accelerated music visualization plugin for Winamp and Kodi, which was originally developed by Ryan Geiss in 2001. It uses DirectX and beat detection to render iterated images which blend seamlessly. MilkDrop uses a complex system of interpolation to transition between presets gradually through time, creating a constantly changing visual experience.
libavcodec is a free and open-source library of codecs for encoding and decoding video and audio data.
Songbird is a discontinued music player originally released in early 2006 with the stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web".
MacAmp is an early GUI-based MP3 audio player, first released on April 13, 1997, for the Macintosh by Dmitry Boldyrev of Nullsoft. Its MP3 decoding capability was based on the PlayMedia Systems AMP MPEG-2, Layers 1, 2 and 3 decoder.
Cthugha is a music visualization computer program. It was written in the mid-1990s by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt, originally for the PC, and was later ported to other platforms. It was freely distributed.
JetAudio is a shareware media player application for Microsoft Windows and Android released in 1997 which offers playback options for a wide range of multimedia file formats.
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