Charting the Beatles

Charting the Beatles is the brain child of Michael Deal, a New York based graphic artist.   In his words:

These visualizations are part of an extensive study of the music of the Beatles. Many of the diagrams and charts are based on secondary sources, including but not limited to sales statistics, biographies, recording session notes, sheet music, and raw audio readings

Eventually, Michael intends to produce a book of these charts, and has a placeholder website that should have more details once they’re available.

There’s also an extensive collection of pictures available on his Flickr group.

via

Using Visualizations for Music Discovery

Hot of the presses, here are the sides for the tutorial that Justin and Paul are presenting at ISMIR 2009 on October 26.

Note that the live presentation will include many demonstrations and videos of visualizations that just are not practical to include in a PDF.  If you have the chance, be sure to check out the tutorial at ISMIR in Kobe on the 26th.

Visualizing emotion in lyrics

Joris Klerkx has built a visualizer of the emotions in lyrics.  Joris has  integrated a karaoke player and Synesketch, a framework for visualizing 6 basic emotions, defined by Ekman (happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust). The player takes a song, plays it, and with each line of text that plays in the lyrics, the strongest emotion of that line is visualized.  In the image above, on the left hand side, you’ll see the 6 emotions and their visualization. On the right hand side, 2 screenshots of demo’s of the prototype.
Some video of the player in action:

• Thriller by Michael Jackson: emotions fear, angry, sad & disgust are well visible in the end.
• Shiny Happy People by REM: pretty happy.

Jorik points out that it can be interesting to see how the visualizations contrast with how the song sounds since offten times the emotion and mood of the lyrics of a song contrast with how the song sounds

Creator:

• Joris Klerkx from the “HyperMedia and DataBases” group at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven