The app combines randomness and control in an intriguing way. I also like the fine microtonal control it gives you. You can also use it as a MIDI controller for other software, though I haven’t given that a try yet. If you want to try it for yourself and you don’t have an iOS or Android device, you can snag the desktop version, for free no less.

Aside from Nodebeat, the best three iOS music apps I’ve tried are:

• Animoog — a faithful reproduction of a Moog analog synth. Fascinating, wonderful, versatile, but very complex and I haven’t even begun to plumb its depths.
• Figure — a very stripped-down version of Reason with a beautifully minimalist interface, a sense of humor and wonderful sounds. It also has some maddening shortcomings, however, like not being able to save or export your work (unless you hook up a cable to other recording software from your headphone jack.) Also, nice though the interface is, it would be good to be able to more directly edit your patterns. I presume (hope) they’ll be rolling out more of this kind of functionality in future versions.
• Soundrop — more of a toy than a musical instrument per se, but an excellent toy. If you like quasi-randomness in your music, this offers you tons of gratification. Free, well worth monkeying around with.

I haven’t tried some of the big name iOS music programs yet. I’m told Garageband is pretty great, and the Electribe looks pretty interesting. For the most part, the apps I’ve looked at are too limited to seem worth the while compared to serious software like Ableton, Pro Tools, Reason and so on. But I’m keeping an open mind. If you have recommendations, please put them in the comments.

Katie Wilkie, Simon Holland, and Paul Mulholland. Winter, 2010. What Can The Language Of Musicians Tell Us About Music Interaction Design? Computer Music Journal, Vol. 34, No. 4, Pages 34-48

The authors discuss the ways that user interface design for music production and teaching software is informed by embodied cognition, as articulated by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their book Metaphors We Live By. Lakoff and Johnson argue that all metaphors trace their roots to states of the human body, which are the only basis for abstract thought that we possess. The closer a metaphor is to a state of the body, the easier it is for us to understand.

In music, the most obvious bodily metaphors are rhythm and repetition, which we experience throughout the sensory world, not just in music. We also use a variety of spatial metaphors for music, referred to by the authors as image schemas. Listeners commonly conceive of music using images of containers, cycles, verticality, balance, the notion of center-periphery, and (in the case of western melodies) a narrative of source-path-goal.

An example of the container schema is the statement “Bb is in the key of F.” We imagine the key of F as a container, with Bb as one of its contents. We think of chords as being stacked vertically, like a pile of bricks. When we conceive melodies, we think of the line going for a metaphorical walk, with altitude standing in for pitch: “The melody starts on F, goes up to Bb, down to A, and then lands back on F.” (However, the “pitch-as-height” metaphor is muddied by the circularity of pitch class, and by the fact that we feel ascending pitch movement differently from ascending.) We may use alternative image schemas; that higher pitches are brighter, and lower pitches are darker. We are on stronger footing with the notion of the tonic as “home base” — we imagine a piece that modulates through different keys as going out on a journey and then returning home.

People approach software equipped with bodily image schemas, learned and innate. The highest praise one can give to an interface is that it is “intuitive.” The authors define an intuitive interface as one that allows the user to apply prior knowledge and existing image schema: innate, sensory-motor, embodied, cultural, or expert.

The authors evaluate two software programs in terms of their intuitiveness, or lack thereof. The first is Harmony Space, a program written by one of the paper’s authors to “systematically and richly designed to exploit spatial metaphors for harmonic concepts.” (Unfortunately, this software is no longer available online, aside from low-resolution screenshots.) Harmony Space organizes the diatonic pitches onto a grid with the topology of a torus, organized by Euler’s tonnetz scheme. This organization helps users understand harmony in terms of spatial proximity. In Harmony Space, adjacent notes form diatonic thirds and triads. Chords and scales form distinctive geometric shapes. The user can transpose chords and other patterns by simply moving the shapes around on the grid. While this is an elegant didactic tool, it is only partially useful. By design, Harmony Space totally neglects rhythm. The authors discuss the difficulty of designing a visualization scheme for rhythm that is as elegant as the tone grid.

The other software program evaluated is Apple’s Garageband. Since Apple includes it for free with Macs, Garageband has become widely used by amateurs. It is a simplified version of Logic, using the same multitrack tape recorder metaphor as most other DAWs. This metaphor is not immediately intuitive, but it is easily learned — users quickly learn to imagine a chorus of voices, with each voice occupying its own horizontal track. The left-to-right timeline is also immediately intuitive once the user sees it in action. Garageband adds an appealing loop library to the basic recording functionality. The loops can be altered by the user in a full-fledged MIDI editor.

The authors praise Garageband for its combination of versatility and accessibility, but they miss some of the program’s shortcomings as a tool for beginner self-teaching. Garageband offers many attractive-sounding loops and instrument sounds, but offers no suggestion as to how to make good musical use of those materials. It does not suggest, for example, that by western pop tradition, loops sound best when repeated two, four, eight or sixteen times. Also, it makes no attempt at showing harmonic relationships; users are left to trial and error to find musical chord/scale combinations. Ideally, Garageband’s MIDI editor would suggest to the user which notes would actually sound good, perhaps by coloring chord tones green, extensions yellow and dissonant notes red.

Garageband and Harmony Space are intriguing, but surely better visual metaphors for music have yet to be implemented. For example, while the “container” for chords is intuitive, it is also misleading, since the chord is comprised of tones, not a box for them. A better image would be tones as atoms and chords as molecules built from those atoms, which gets at their relational nature better. As the molecule becomes a more familiar image, it will become available as an “intuitive” image schema.

I anticipate that the next generation of beginner-oriented production software will draw not on the tape recorder metaphor, but on the sampler. I could imagine simplified version of the Session View in Ableton Live, allowing the user to build songs out of musical “legos,” dragging and dropping in real time.

See also a post collecting my favorite music visualization systems.

First of all, here’s the original version from Snow White.

Once you’ve got the tune in your head, listen to the Miles Davis recording.

The extended intro section uses a pedal point, which just means that bassist Paul Chambers plays the same note over and over. The pedal point creates a feeling of floating suspense. Drummer Jimmy Cobb plays gentle waltz time with his brushes: one-and-two-and-three-and, one-and-two-and-three-and. (Most jazz tunes are in four-four time, so each bar would be one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and.) Pianist Wynton Kelly plays some improvised figures based mostly on arpeggios, broken-up chords.

At 0:40, Miles Davis enters, playing the melody on muted trumpet. Even though he interprets the tune’s timing very loosely and adds some ornaments of his own, you should have no trouble singing the words along with him. This section is called the head, and as is the case with a lot of jazz tunes, it’s thirty-two bars long. Here’s the chart, if you’re a music reader.

At 1:17, Miles begins his solo. Over the same thirty-two bar form of the original song, he improvises a new melody. He chooses his notes spontaneously, but not randomly — the solo has to make sense against the song’s chords as they go by. You can keep track of the form by continuing to sing the words. As you do, hear how Miles’ playing interacts with the original melody. Miles is famous for his dark and moody style, and for his unhurried pacing. He plays fewer notes than his virtuosic sidemen, using frequent silences. You can hear him going back and forth between a tuneful style that refers back to the melody and a more abstract approach, choosing notes that form patterns for their own sake, sometimes rubbing tensely against the chords.

Each pass through the form of the song is called a chorus. Miles plays three choruses — you can sing the words three times over his solo. At 2:26, Miles ends his second chorus with a funky repetitive riff on one note. At 3:05, the end of the third chorus, he reiterates this one-note riff and extends it, allowing it to spill over past the end of the form with a nonchalance that’s typical Miles.

At 3:11, there’s a more energetic feeling in the drums as Jimmy Cobb switches from the soft-sounding brushes to the louder and more percussive sticks, and Hank Mobley begins his tenor saxophone solo. While Hank is an excellent saxophonist, he doesn’t come off on this recording too well — he was new to Miles’ band, and didn’t yet have his feet under him. Also, his softer and more lyrical improvisational style sounds a little schmaltzy compared to Miles’ acidic tone. (In fairness, if you want to hear Hank at his best, check out his classic album Soul Station.) After two choruses, you can hear Hank pause awkwardly at around 4:18, not deliberately like Miles, but out of uncertainty as to what to play next. He finishes his solo lamely, with a banal concluding phrase. This kind of moment is a reminder that improvisation is an intrinsically risky undertaking. Any jazz soloist has to face to possibility of an unsatisfying improvisation, or even a complete trainwreck. The risk of failure (or incomplete success) is exactly what makes jazz the exciting art form that it is.

Next comes Wynton Kelly’s piano solo, at 4:26. As in his intro, Wynton plays a lot of arpeggios, short fragments that call and respond to each other. Wynton sounds a lot more relaxed and on his game than Hank Mobley, no surprise since he was a veteran Miles Davis sideman. Wynton gets a chorus and a half, and at 5:24, Miles takes over, restating the second half of the melody. Then there’s a short interlude, using the same pedal point as the intro. This reiteration of the head and intro mid-song is an unusual structural move. Miles is setting the stage for the tune’s dramatic climax, the entrance of John Coltrane.

A little back story is helpful here. Coltrane had played tenor sax in Miles’ regular group on and off through the second half of the 1950s. Together, the two of them created some of the best and most famous recordings in jazz history, including Round About Midnight, Milestones and Kind Of Blue. (Go buy them! You won’t regret it.) At the time of the “Prince” recording session, Coltrane had recently left Miles to lead his own staggeringly great band, but he happened to be visiting the studio that day, so Miles invited him to sit in.

What you’re hearing at 5:52 is Coltrane playing with zero preparation, just sight-reading the chord chart. That may sound impressive, but it’s actually pretty common for jazz recording sessions. What you should be impressed by is the effortless intensity and power of Coltrane’s improvisation. His solo gradually builds in complexity until by the start of the second chorus, he’s playing doubletime, cramming twice as many notes into each measure as the pulse of the tune would suggest. His lines twist and spiral with a complexity unmatched by anyone else in jazz at that time.

It isn’t just his technical ability that makes Coltrane great. Even at speed, his note choices all make emotional sense, and his lines have a rock-solid melodic structure to them. If you slow Coltrane’s solos down, they become quite tuneful, even catchy. It’s one thing to be able to throw a lot of notes around; it’s a lot more rare to have all those notes tell a compelling story. The “Prince” solo is just a taste of Coltrane’s firehose-like stream of brilliant ideas, cut short by his untimely death only six years later.

After a short interlude, Miles plays the head out, the final statement of the melody. Usually the head out is identical to the head, but in this case, Miles just plays the first half of it. Then there’s an outtro, much the same as the intro, a piano groove over the pedal point in the bass. Wynton Kelly plays more freely than he did on the intro, using darker and crunchier harmonies, probably inspired by Coltrane. Finally, the tune winds to a spontaneous close, by a hand signal or eye contact among the players. You can hear that Jimmy Cobb doesn’t quite land in the same spot as everyone else, he carries over a few extra beats. Then someone in the room makes a mysterious “pop” sound with their mouth, and the tune is over.

Most mainstream jazz recordings follow this same basic sequence of events, called the head-solos-head form. The band plays the melody, with or without an intro. Then different musicians play solos on the melody’s form and chord progression. Finally, the whole band plays the melody again and the tune ends. There are infinite variations on this basic structure. You can get a taste for them just by listening to different versions of “Someday My Prince Will Come,” which has been recorded many times by jazz musicians over the years. Miles himself was inspired by Dave Brubeck’s 1957 recording, which is faster and doesn’t have the moody pedal-point interludes.

I chose this example specifically because it’s a well-known song to most of you reading this. Jazz is harder to understand now than it was back in the 40s and 50s because the repertoire is based around songs that were popular then but are esoteric now. Miles’ repertoire in the fifties and early sixties would have mostly been as familiar to his audience as “Prince.” Listeners would have been able to mentally sing along to just about everything, making all of Miles’ intellectual abstractions easier to parse. Jazz was still commercial music then, and when jazz musicians wrote their own tunes, they had a tendency to be as melodic and catchy as showtunes and standards — Miles’ own compositions of the period, like “So What” and “All Blues,” are about as catchy and hooky as music gets.

If you want to listen to jazz now, you’re at a big disadvantage. Without knowing all those pop standards and showtunes, the improvisation based on them will just sound like random strings of notes. I had a much easier time getting into jazz through tunes like “So What” than through standards. Contemporary musicians are playing abstractions of references to abstractions to references to songs that were popular sixty, seventy or even eighty years ago. It’s left to the listener to supply all the historical context. The best way to approach the music is to start on familiar territory with a tune you know and like, and check out how different artists approach it. Miles and Coltrane are great people to investigate, because they liked playing corny pop songs that are still in wide circulation, and because nearly everything they did was so awesome. Happy listening.

Before “Believe,” Auto-tune was used for its intended purpose: to correct vocal performances in a natural-sounding, transparent way. Cher’s producers Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling discovered that if they turned the Retune Speed setting to zero, it produced the futuristic robot sound we’ve all come to know well. Since they were producing a high-tech dance track, they figured that the robot sound fit the mood, so they kept it in.

I doubt that Taylor and Rawling were the first people to discover the zero retune speed setting, but they were the first to use it on a mass-market commercial recording. To keep other people from imitating the sound, they told interviewers that they had achieved the effect with a vocoder. The music press repeated their story endlessly, so to this day there’s widespread confusion about the difference between vocoder and Auto-tune.

Original question on Quora

The top row shows the fundamental frequency, the one you hear as the pitch — say it’s a violin string playing A 440. The second row shows the first harmonic, the string vibrating in halves, producing A 880. The harmonic is quieter than the fundamental, so you aren’t necessarily conscious of it, but you can isolate it by lightly touching the string at its halfway point while playing. The other rows show other harmonics, vibrations of the string in integer ratios, each producing a pitch that’s an integer multiple of the fundamental frequency. The second harmonic is E 1320; the third is A 1760; the fourth is C# 2200.

In an ideal string, the harmonics would continue to get infinitely higher, beyond the range of your hearing. As the harmonics get higher, they also get quieter and subtler. Still, they all have an impact on the overall sound of the instrument. All musical instruments have overtones: winds, the human throat, speaker cones, even well-tuned drumheads.

Read more about how harmonics form the basis of western music theory.

Original post on Quora

I’d put “Oh Yoko” up there too. “Imagine” has a gorgeous melody, but the lyrics are like something an eighth grader would write.

Paul: “Live And Let Die”

A close second: “Maybe I’m Amazed.”

George: “I’d Have You Anytime”

Kind of a toss-up with “Isn’t It A Pity.”

Ringo: um, I dunno, maybe “Pure Gold”

Original post on Quora

Harry Truman played classical piano.

Richard Nixon played classical piano too, and even composed a bit.

Condoleeza Rice has pro-quality classical chops. Don’t miss her appearance on 30 Rock.

Former federal reserve chairman Alan Greenspan attended Juilliard and played professional alto sax and clarinet in the Woody Herman band before going into finance. Unfortunately, I can’t find a video.

Of course, there’s Bill Clinton and his famous sax solo.

Mike Huckabee plays respectable rock bass. Here he is playing with Def Leppard, don’t miss.

Finally, who could forget former Attorney General and singer-songwriter John Ashcroft? Awful though he is, the song is weirdly catchy.

Original post on Quora

The Facebook page lists about eleven billion examples of The Lick. Here are some of my favorites.

Miles Davis, “Two Bass Hit” — John Coltrane plays it at 1:15 and 1:39.

John Coltrane, “Impressions” — listen at 3:11.

Coltrane again, “On Green Dolphin Street,” at 1:32.

Freddie Hubbard playing “A Love Supreme” at a Coltrane tribute concert — 0:16.

Sonny Rollins on Miles Davis’ “It’s Only A Paper Moon” at 2:25.

Sonny Rollins, “John S” at 1:51.

Grant Green, “Nomad” — Bobby Hutcherson plays The Lick at 4:12, 4:46 and 4:53.

Charles Mingus, “Peggy’s Blue Skylight” — Joe Gardner at 1:34.

The Lick doesn’t just belong to jazz. Stravinsky uses it in “The Fire Bird” — listen at 14:43.

The Lick is a pop and rock staple too. Player uses a variant of it in “Baby Come Back” — listen at 0:13.

Santana plays yet another variant in “Oye Como Va” — listen at 0:17.

Akon sings The Lick right at the beginning of “Just A Man.”

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of four versions of The Lick, all transposed to A minor for clarity.

These few variations on The Lick only hint at the richness of explosive diversity you can find on the Facebook page. The Lick is one of those musical memes, like the Amen break or the “Egyptian” melody, that can adapt itself to a seemingly limitless variety of circumstances. There’s a lot of debate on FB about whether a given phrase counts as The Lick or not, since many of the examples stretch the time or alter the pitches, or both. These debates are a lot like the ones biologists get into around taxonomic issues, whether a given fossil is a dinosaur or a bird. The Lick mutates and evolves exactly like a gene in a population of organisms. You can think of The Lick as being like a single gene that codes for a single protein, functioning as part of a larger musical genome, a tune or a solo.

We come down hard on artists who use cliches too much, and praise others for originality. But if iconoclastic musicians on the level of Coltrane use The Lick so heavily, how bad can cliches be? Too much originality is an obstacle to creating emotionally resonant music. Coltrane’s last albums were by far his most original — you’re not going to hear too many cliches on Ascension or Sun Ship. But I find those albums challenging at best, and most people find them unbearable. Coltrane’s best art is based on familiar materials — showtunes, folk music, the blues. The best art doesn’t avoid cliches; it owns them, personalizes them and transforms them. I say, long live The Lick.

There’s no way to separate out the different tracks from a mixed song. If you want the vocals isolated, you need to get your hands on the acapella version of the song. DJ versions of pop and hip-hop singles often include the acapella and instrumental. Every so often a band will sell or give away “stems” — tracks with each instrument isolated. Stems also sometimes leak onto the web. Google is your friend here.

If you can’t get your hands on acapellas, instrumentals or stems, you can still do a lot of creative mashing up. Look for sections that are “in the clear,” where one instrument plays in isolation. Intros, endings and breakdown sections are good places to look for samples. I’m especially fond of laying a funky rhythm section break under a jazz or folk song, for example the breakdown of “1999″ by Prince under “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan.

As for how to learn: just do it, do it, do it. The web is loaded with useful tutorials. Find some other DJs and remixers and ask for tips, or collaborate. The beauty of the digital music world is that busting out tracks and sharing them for comments and criticism costs nothing but your time. Don’t be too precious about your ideas. Get your tracks finished and play them for other people as often you can. After you do a couple dozen, they’ll start sounding musical, and after a hundred you’ll have some stuff that you’re proud of. Most importantly: have fun.

Here my recent remixes and mashups, enjoy:

Original post on Quora

Music notation

Western music notation is a venerable method of visualizing music. It’s a very neat and compact system, unambiguous and digital, and not too difficult to learn. Programs like Sibelius can effortlessly translate notation to and from MIDI data, too.

But western notation has some limitations, especially for contemporary music. It doesn’t handle microtones well. It has limited ability to convey performative nuance — after a hundred years of jazz, there’s no good way to notate swing other than to just write the word “swing” at the top of the score. The key signature system works fine for major keys, but is less helpful for minor keys and modal music and is pretty much worthless for the blues.

Here’s a suggestion for how notation could improve in the future. It’s a visualization by Jon Snydal of John Coltrane’s solo in Miles Davis’ “All Blues”  (I edited it a little to be easier on the eyes.)

Snydal’s visualization is more analog than digital — it shows the exact nuances of Coltrane’s performance, with subtle shadings of pitch, timing and dynamics.

MIDI sequencers suggest further improvements over standard notation. Here’s a simplified electronic music sequencer called iNudge. Play, it’s fun:

Here’s Thelonious Monk’s tune “Four In One” as shown in standard MIDI “piano roll” view. The rectangles show not only which notes are being played and when, but exactly how long they’re held. Darker red means louder, paler pink means quieter. You can also read volume off the bars along the bottom.

MIDI is a versatile and user-friendly system. It can capture your keyboard performances, you can import scores, and you can even just draw notes onto the screen directly (my preferred method.)

The Music Animation Machine has a wonderful series of videos matching MIDI piano rolls of various classical pieces with recordings of them. Here’s Bach’s infamous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

As software gets more sophisticated in its ability to extract pitch data from actual audio recordings, you can start manipulating them with the same ease as MIDI. Here’s a screencap of the pitch-correction program Melodyne, a close cousin of Auto-tune.

The lines show the actual sung pitches, and the orange blobs show the notes the program thinks the singer meant to hit. The blobs’ thickness shows volume. You can drag and drop the blobs and redraw the lines at will to alter the melody to your heart’s content. Melodyne even transcribes the performance to standard notation and MIDI for you.

High and low

We’ve made up our collective mind that faster frequencies should be spatially represented as being “higher,” and that slower ones should be spatially “lower.” It seems so reasonable, but really it’s totally arbitrary, and doesn’t even line up with physical experience. On the piano, the high notes are on the right and the low ones on the left. On the guitar, the “low” E string is physically located above the “high” one. The fingerings for higher and lower notes on wind instruments don’t correspond to a simple higher-lower axis either.

Absolute pitch is a straight line ladder, but pitch class is circular. The truest representation of pitch space is a helix.

Other ways to conceptualize pitch space

High and low aren’t the only metaphors we use for faster and slower vibrations. Like I said, pitch class is circular.

But the circle is really just replacing up/down with clockwise/counterclockwise. There are other ways to conceptualize pitch. We intuitively experience changing pitches as moving closer and further, or inwards and outwards. We also think of higher pitches as brighter and lower pitches as darker. Players of stringed instruments sometimes tune their upper strings a little bit too high on purpose, producing an effect known as brilliance.

Time

It’s a universal convention that notation shows time moving from left to right. But that’s not the only possible axis to use. How about forwards and backwards instead? That’s the paradigm in rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution and Guitar Hero. The purest realization of this concept is in a game called FreQuency.

The game even allows you to construct your own remixes.

I like this tunnel metaphor and would like to see it extended into a full-blown production environment.

Waves

Pitches are sine-wave vibrations, and you can visualize them as such.

Sine waves wouldn’t make for very a helpful music notation, but they do help you understand what’s going on scientifically when you physically hear something. They’re even better animated:

See all of Wikipedia’s animated drum heads.

Waveforms

Audio editors show music as amplitude waveforms, blobs that get wider where the sound is louder. Here’s the Funky Drummer break in Recycle. The blue blobs show drum hits. These amplitude blobs don’t tell you much about the musical content except for timing and volume. But Recycle was meant for drum loops, where timing and volume are the only information you really need.

Here’s a graphic I made showing how you hear the Funky Drummer as it’s looping:

In a post on Design Observer, Rob Walker discusses the waveform as the new icon for music, replacing the stylized eighth notes or records that have done the job in the past. The SoundCloud player uses an attractive waveform graphic that helps the listener track where they are in the song by following the volume peaks. There’s even a SoundCloud group called Pretty Waveforms.

Tomorrow Never Knows by ethanhein

The waveform has the potential to move from purely functional settings to more decorative ones. Here’s a waveform-based labeling concept by Joshua Distler, showing the tracks on Post by Björk.

Music theory and networks

I’ve always thought it would be cool to use networks to conceptualize music theory, and have made a few attempts at doing so. Here’s a comparison between the circle of half-steps and the circle of fifths, which are involutes of each other:

Here’s a map of the chord progressions in “Giant Steps” by John Coltrane.

And here’s a flowchart showing how you can figure out what scale or mode you’re hearing.

It would be way cooler to have more abstract three-dimensional interactive visualizations showing how chords, scales and melodies function. Leonhard Euler showed how you can represent tonal harmony as a lattice with the topology of a torus, as shown in this animation. Red lines show major thirds, green lines show minor thirds, and blue lines show fifths:

I have ambitions of my own in this area, but so far, I lack the programming skills to realize them. Others are taking some exciting strides, though. Dmitri Tymoczko made waves for getting the first music-related article published in Science about his topological visualization methods for tonal harmony. I can’t quite wrap my head around his ideas, but they’re intriguing.

Here’s an illustration by Aniruddh Patel from his paper, “Language, Music, Syntax And The Brain.” Again, I’m not totally clear what it all means, but I plan to investigate further.

Other theorists have attempted to use color to show harmonic function. Scriabin invented a “keyboard of lights” for that purpose, though it didn’t really catch on.

Visualizing musical form and structure

I like to use simple color-coding to keep track of which section is which while working on a song. Yellow is for intros and outtros, blue is for verses, green is for choruses and orange is for instrumentals and breakdowns.

Edward Tufte shows some more sophisticated song structure visualizations on his forum:

The Shape of Song project by Martin Wattenburg shows repetition within a piece of music. Here’s his visualization of “Like A Prayer” by Madonna.

Here’s Wattenburg’s visualization of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”

Speculation

Here’s an entertaining video showing how you can create a happening drum machine sequence using counting in binary by Niklas Roy.

Wouldn’t this graph coloring system make a cool music notation or interface?

Visual Complexity has many more ideas like this one.

I feel like we’ve barely scratched the surface of useful and attractive schemes. Are there other cool visualization methods I should know about? Hit the comments.

Updates

John Clover hipped me to this post, which overlaps heavily: Amazing Music Visualizations and Teaching

I just had the chance to play with some of Björk‘s Biophilia song/apps. Some of them are groundbreaking interactive visualizations; some are just entertaining and groovy; some are baffling but deserve points for creativity. All the way around, it’s a remarkable experiment, one that I think is going to be influential.

See this post on Quora