Audio Painting pt 1

Besides from Motion Graphics and Compositing, one of my interests on learning processing was to be able to create illustrations by using audio as the data source for visualization, not moving visuals, but paintings that were made of audio. This has been a long term project for me which has evolved on many different ways to create audio paintings, which will be logged in this blog over time.

The first attempt at creating representations of audio started as a particular new type of waveform. It started by my first looks at Jared Tarbell’s Sand Strokes. In which I thought they were stylish waveforms coming from audio sources… after reading, I noticed they were not, and started my own proyect for creating different waveforms which were more informative and more pleasant to the eye than the traditional ones.

The Mars Volta's "Frances the mute" album, Illustrated

So, thanks to minim i managed to easily read both input audio and audio from files, take their fft and interpret the audio’s frequency to create a false-color to add to the classic waveform. At that time i was drawing by using every audio sample with it’s frequency information, which probed itself not very useful when rendering high audio levels.

The nice thing about this version was that different genres of music yielded completely different results and the variety in the use of percussion and certain instruments was clearly visible… and white noise looked… white :D

Nice about this version also, was that different people’s voices returned different colors because of their different tones and everyone could expend a while staring at my computer’s screen making weird noises.