![]() ![]() Import the CSV generated from midicsv-process.Ģ. ![]() Patterns of the music are more apparent, and overall, they’re more visually appealing.ġ. The second set of images, with the true timestamps, are much more structured and consistent. The first images were very chaotic and contained the risk of calculation errors. The difference made by having the true timestamps in the XML export is significant for the visualizations of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” to me it feels like night and day. While this produced nice graphics, they weren’t as accurate as I wish they were. Once I had those timestamp-like values, I chose to space them out equidistant around a circle. That meant I could tell when notes were played simultaneously, but tempo changes weren’t factored in, and I had to cobble together some concatenation formulas to generate timestamp-like values based on several values for each note. The closest to a timestamp was a value that indicated how far each note was placed in each measure of the sheet music. Prior to this script, I wasn’t able to plot notes based on when they were played because timestamps weren’t included in the XML export. I can’t thank Peter enough for writing this script. The result is a much cleaner set of data, complete with note names like D4# (a D# in the fourth octave) for verification. Import CSV into NodeBox to generate images. ![]() To take a simple illustration, Figure 1 demonstrates the evolution of the poster for “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” You can see how single instruments are represented using a single color, and multiple instruments are represented using multiple colors in order to add an extra dimension to the visual. The size of the dot indicates the duration of the note, and the color of the dot is different for each instrument. The cover for this edition of Patterns is Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” but my visualizations range from Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” to Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Pitch is indicated by the distance from the center of the image, while the time at which the note occurs is given by the angle from the 12 o’clock position. In each image, an individual dot represents a note in the score of a piece of music. When I first tweeted it, it quickly became my most popular tweet at the time, and it allowed me to break away from the short efficient five-bar staff representation of notes, showing notes on the same scale. ![]() I finally settled on representing a score as a circle. My aim is to take an existing structure and visualize the raw data in a radically different way to see what we can gain from a new perspective. My work is meant for those who want to connect with stories in a new way, whether that’s a music score, a modern reproduction of a brochure for antique typographical machinery, or a timeline of spacewalk milestones since the dawn of modern space exploration. The aim was to find a way to represent an entire musical score in a single image-not necessarily as an infographic but something fans of the music would enjoy having on their wall because they’re familiar with the music. However, I’ve always enjoyed how sheet music looks so I took a shot at visualizing the notes from musical scores, and the result is a series of posters called “Off the Staff.” The beautiful complexity of sheet music begs for experimental notation, and I’m hardly the first, but I wanted to bring my own interpretation to the process. The talent of reading music has always escaped me, which is a little ironic considering I grew up in a musical family. ![]()
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