Adventures in Electrostatic

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THIS is my first post for “Visualizing Data for the Five Senses” class this Fall.
Our first assignment was to think about sound and an appropriate way to visualize it on the computer using Processing.

My main beef with the way sound is typically visualized is the instantaneous-ness of it: graphic equalizers and the like are just bouncing lines on my screen… I know what they are supposed to represent, amplitudes of frequency bands, but they change so much that you cannot really get a sense of what is going on. What I thought would be interesting is a visualization that is an aggregate over the whole sound clip so that one could get an idea of the character or ‘fingerprint’ of the clip… So that’s what I made.

Using mostly the Minim library for Processing I created an application that Fast-Fourier-Transforms a .mp3 you give it and displays the freq. amplitudes real-time as it plays. The difference between my ‘SoundFingerprint’ and standard graphic equalizers is the accumulation of the data. As the sound plays it builds a picture of its freq. content, giving you a btter idea of its characteristics.

To continue, next week I think I will add a 3rd dimention to the graphic… time.