GoKawiilwaveloop: what fable left me
Over the two days we had Fable 5, it made me a music visualizer. This is the realization of something I have daydreamed about for as long as I can remember.
You can see it here: Waveloop
The idea is that a music visualizer should viscerally reveal the harmonic and melodic structure of the music. Most visualizers fail to do this — you get a vague sense of loudness, and maybe the bass/treble split, but that's it.
How can we do better? As we all know, the foundation of Western diatonic music theory is ¹²√2, the ratio between the frequencies of successive semitones. (I ignore other temperaments; they are all close enough to 12-TET.) Twelve of these takes you to the next octave, and notes that are a whole number of octaves apart are considered to be in the same pitch class.
Waveloop captures this cyclic structure in a chromatic circle, 30° per semitone, one revolution per octave. Any instant in the music is captured as a spiral stacked histogram, showing you how much of each pitch class is present. The layers of the histogram are different colors capturing different octaves: muted blues and greens for the bass, fiery orange and red and violet for mid-tones, and sparkly gold and sky for treble, tracing a spiral through oklch.
This representation has some nice properties:
You can read intervals simply as angles. Here are the intervals:
m2 30° M2 60° m3 90° M3 120° P4 150° TT 180° P5 210° m6 240° M6 270° m7 300° M7 330°
You can tell the quality of a chord from its shape. Transposing rotates the shape; inversion leaves it unchanged. Here are some common chord qualities:
... continue reading