I PROMISE TO MAKE YOU GIVE A SHIT

This is some background on my concept for a new musical instrument based loosely on drum corps and batucadas, with the idea of visualizing mallet-based performance gestures.

Music visualization is a curious endeavor. In the last 50 years, we have developed visual music, which is the concept of taking principles of music and manifesting them visually. In the last 20 years, subsequent to the development of visual music, advancements in sound analysis software for computers led to the development of sophisticated music visualizers being built-in to everyday programs (think Windows Media Player visualizers circa 1999).

Moving snowflakes!

In many ways, music visualization is just reverse engineering a musical score, merely showing how the different parts of a sound structure can be broken down into their components and then rendered visually. And much like data visualization, there is a lingering hope that some new profundity will be achieved with novel presentation, that visualizing sound will enrich the experience.

Often the goal of these visualizations is diffuse and rather unclear. It seems like the goal of most music visualizations is to highlight advances in sound recognition software, or the programming chops of a specific programmer (I still love you, flight404):

Audio responsive, snake from flight404 on Vimeo.

But there are several more explorations of music visualization that are more compelling to me that I feel remain largely untouched. For one, the playing of acoustic instruments has an inherent visual component that I think deserves to be highlighted in and of itself. Peruse the drum corps below to see what I mean. They often do an excellent job of showing off not only the technical prowess of playing music together in sync, but the mechanics of playing synchronized music, and they achieve this by exaggerating their gestures.

This concept was a really compelling source for visualizing music, and so I have been developing a piece called Seasons that tries to visualize the mechanics of this sort of group performance by using the gestures as the source of visualization. Below is a visual, video-based prototype of the idea I have in mind, with the goal of eventually building 10 of these instruments and playing the piece with a small ensemble: