Robert Krawczyk

The Art of Music: Exploring the Visualization of Music

The relationship of data to physical form is at times very subtle and abstract. The challenge is to attempt to extract the beauty in the data itself. Music can be expressed digitally in a MIDI file format; each individual instrument each note played including its frequency, timings, and velocity. A large rich set of physical forms is possible using such simple data. The underlying question explored is “What can music look like?” Visualizing music explores another dimension to an already rich art form.

The use of children songs is of particular interest since all of us have a strong memory of these tunes; so the visualization should be easily identified if the visualization carries much of the original tune.

The first in these explorations was a series of digital sketches attempting to model each note, its shape, and size based on note length and frequency, this series consists of a four layer laser cut wood relief.