Music Visualization

Any given sound can be represented via a graph with the Cartesian coordinate system (x, y, and z). The two co-ordinates to populate a sound wave are frequency and time. Music visualization is a feature that is used to plot the playing of the sound in two dimensional or three dimensional axes and can be found in some music player applications.

Some players carry the feature as an inbuilt one; others need plug-ins to incorporate it with the main application.

Music visualization can be both simple and complex. The simple one displays the ‘oscillating curve form’ of the music whereas the complex ones display a number of composite effects. The process of visualization uses both music’s loudness and spectrum of the sound frequency.

A number of music playing and editing softwares are out there for the personal computers. Given the power of a PC, playing and editing music are an easy task even with the most basic of the system. Music playing softwares include the likes of Windows Media Player, Real Media Player, Win amp, Audition, Sonic Player, SoundJam, Jet Audio Player, etc. Adobe Audition, Sound Forge and ACID from Sony, Realtor, and Cool Edit Pro are some popular sound editing tools for the PC platform.

In 1994, Cthugha came out. It is the first music visualization software. Win amp was the first windows based music player to catch the attention of millions of music lovers all over the world. Cthugha stirred similar implementation of music visualization tools in the music player. Within 1999 and onwards, dozens of non-trivial free music visualizers populated the free and shareware market. Bomb, Beat Harness, ExVis, GloPlug, Goom, iTunes, Noise Cradle, projectM, Virtual Light Machine, Visual Jockey, Zuma Pro, etc came out as plug-ins for Win amp, WMP and other players.

G-Force by Andy O'Meara, MilkDrop by Ryan Geiss, and Advanced Visualization Studio (AVS) from the house of Nullsoft became widely accepted music visualizers in the world. Apart from the windows OS there are some nifty music players and visualizers for other systems also. Synaesthesia, eXtrace, The X Multimedia System (XMMS) and XMMS Root Visualization for POSIX operating system, Paranormal for Linux OS, Scivi for POSIX and Linux, etc.

Music visualization tools use laser lighting display to perform individual visualizations for each song. And the pattern changes every time the application is run. The Beat Harness plug-in for Win amp was the first to create the sense of personalization and the professional VJ approach in the visualizers.