flâneur

waveloop: what fable left me

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Over the two days we had Fable 5, it made me a music visualizer. This is the realization of something I have daydreamed about for as long as I can remember. You can see it here: Waveloop The idea is that a music visualizer should viscerally reveal the harmonic and melodic structure of the music. Most visualizers fail to do this — you get a vague sense of loudness, and maybe the bass/treble split, but that's it. How can we do better? As we all know, the foundation of Western diatonic music theory is ¹²√2, the ratio between the frequencies of successive semitones. (I ignore other temperaments; they are all close enough to 12-TET.) Twelve of these takes you to the next octave, and notes that are a whole number of octaves apart are considered to be in the same pitch class. Waveloop captures this cyclic structure in a chromatic circle, 30° per semitone, one revolution per octave. Any instant in the music is captured as a spiral stacked histogram, showing you how much of each pitch class is

Over the two days we had Fable 5, it made me a music visualizer. This is the realization of something I have daydreamed about for as long as I can remember. You can see it here: Waveloop The idea is that a music visualizer should viscerally reveal the harmonic and melodic structure of the music. Most visualizers fail to do this — you get a vague sense of loudness, and maybe the bass/treble split, but that's it. How can we do better? As we all know, the foundation of Western diatonic music theory is ¹²√2, the ratio between the frequencies of successive semitones. (I ignore other…

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