Misual: music visualization based on acoustic data

• Authors: Naoko Kosugi
• Venue: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services
• Year: 2010

This paper describes a music visualization method called Misual. The goal of this research to provide objective and static information regarding musical impressions that will enable people to efficiently categorize a huge number of music pieces and select favorites from them. Features are directly extracted from music and then visualized in an image that suits human intuition. As a first step in this research, volume transitions and repetitions are focued on as the visualized objects. For the volume transition, power information is extracted and then smoothed by a moving average. This information is continuously visualized with 3D-like images, in which radii of circles reflect the volume information. Repetitions are visualized with color. These are detected on the basis of the frame-to-frame similarity measured by the Mel-frequency cepstrum. These two kinds of information were visualized for three pieces of real music. The visualizations will be useful for roughly grasping the musical features in a very short time and imagining the music intuitively.