Music, Illustrated

art, analysis, audio

Signal processing meets music theory.

spectrograms

Gallery.

I specialize in high resolution audio images.

With semitone resolution, mapping the color wheel to the octave reveals tonal relationships.

Wynton Marsalis: detail

_{Wynton Marsalis, 'Blues' (detail)}

The bass register can be difficult to resolve.

whale song detail

_{whale song (detail)}

Characteristic shapes recur, here's an intro.

analysis

Spectral post-processing.

Calculating the spectral auto-correlation matrix (following this paper [fxpal.com]) benefits from sharp spectrograms.

_{Beatles, 'Here comes the Sun', auto-correlation matrix. Easy to spot the break.}

More processing can produce a multi-resolution edge-detector:

_{Beatles, 'All my Loving', spectrogram with auto-correlation matrix and edge detection.}

Which can be used for note and chord finding: multichart

theory

Observations.

_{Black and white sets each are a pentatonic scale. Grey keys complete either set to a diatonic scale.}

_{Frequency range chart}

_{Available intervals by bandwidth}

_{Key-tempo correspondences. I do not know if humans can hear this association.}

visualization

Music visualization videos can reveal subtle elements, and are fun to watch.

Some examples.

contact: nedwaves at gmail dot com