There are some great animated visualizations of classical music at http://www.musanim.com/ or on YouTube (smalin).
Compare the visualization of Mozart’s Overture to the Marriage of Figaro:
with that of Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue…
…and of Debussy’s First Arabesque.
What I would love to do is then compare these different video animations/graph types with the actual musical scores — representing two different kinds of maps of music
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More info:
from http://imaginarysoundspace.wordpress.com/2005/02/12/music-animation-machine/:
The Music Animation Machine is a tool for visualizing music in new ways using video and computer formats. It helps the listener to understand the music in an intuitive way by displaying a scrolling animation of coloured bars that light up on the screen as the music plays.
Here’s a description from the site.
“The Music Animation Machine display is a score without any measures or clefs, in which information about the music’s structure is conveyed with bars of colour representing the notes. These bars scroll across the screen as the music plays. Their position on the screen tells you their pitch and their timing in relation to each other. Different colours denote different instruments or voices, thematic material, or tonality. And each note lights up at the exact moment it sounds, so you can’t lose your place.”
5 short QuickTime movies of classical music pieces are free to download. Two videos are available retailing at $25 each. The earliest video is free of charge to libraries and educators.
The M.A.M. project has been around since the 1980s and the DOS software is offered free to anyone interested.