Classical Music Visualized As A Bar Graph (VIDEO)

Music is embedded with mathematical logic -- But it can be hard to hear the patterns beneath the sounds.

Which is where visualizations come in. While bar graphs call to mind business presentations and third grade science fair projects, YouTube user musanim has repurposed these little lines to help you out.

Using Music Animation Machine MIDI Player, classical favorites including Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune and more, appear as colored lines that scroll along as the music plays. Lines are different lengths depending on the time they're held in the song, and different colors depending on the note being played.

Other kinds of visualizations -- like this interval graphic used in one of Chopin's nocturnes -- also appear on musanim's page.

Watch the visualization for the first movement of Beethoven's Fifth below:

Comments

[brutusmojo]

02:30 PM on 04/13/2012

beautiful,wonderful and so relaxing.

[JScott]

11:14 AM on 04/12/2012

You can see other piece done sometimes on Classic Arts Showcase-I've seen a couple of em on there as well.

[Litho-stone]

02:46 PM on 04/11/2012

I wonder what "The Black Page" would look like.

[dnyal]

01:42 PM on 04/11/2012

The sequence seems like one of the Intel chip processors internal structure.

[Lindegard]

10:06 AM on 04/11/2012

Excellent, but there really should be a credit for the orchestra and conductor!

[jerzygirl45]

06:27 PM on 04/12/2012

I believd that info is at the very end of the video

[Xavier Martin]

11:25 PM on 04/10/2012

Delightful! But why not make a viedo that's also a useful tool for music education? Rather than the purely abstract horizontal colored lines, show the actual music score. -- but displayed as a music professor might do it if he/she was armed with a handful of those familiar pastel highlighting markers.

And along the way, in a bottom margin, give a running commentary of relevant events and musical terms. The first one comes quite early, as the 4th note has a sforzando marking -- that kind of thing.

[marinatha]

10:56 PM on 04/10/2012

Great job.

[Rivethead]

09:39 PM on 04/10/2012

It's cool and all but where I come from we call this a Midi piano roll.

[NonCon]

09:10 PM on 04/11/2012

That's what I thought. Nothing to get excited about unless you've never seen one before. If you're going to watch the midi, a score view is much better.

[bigshotprof]

08:29 PM on 04/10/2012

The 5th is the pinnacle of human artistic achievement, no matter how you . . . uh . . . look at it.

[Leatherzz]

07:21 PM on 04/10/2012

Encore ! ! Encore ! !

[neutrinoflux]

04:34 PM on 04/10/2012

Awesome!