Off the Staff: an experiment in visualizing notes from music scores
I’ve always been passionate about Data Visualization. Not so much in the “drawing” exercise as the creative process of how to translate data into a visualization that facilitates its exploitation and use for a specific purpose. About four years ago I gave a talk in Google Campus (in english), an introduction to this discipline from my experience. The presentation is available at Slideshare.
On the Internet you can find amazing Data Visualization examples, look at the section that Awwwards has or this compilation by DataPine or this one by Tableau, but besides useful visualizations there are also the artistic ones and at this point I want to share with you a spectacular project that combines music with data: Off the Staff by Nicholas Rougeux.
The author defines it as “an experiment to visualize the notes of musical scores”. Each point of each infograph represents a note, the pitch is indicated by the distance from the center of the image, the length of the note is the size, and the instrument is indicated by the color. The display follows the clockwork: it starts at twelve o’clock and moves at a certain speed depending on the length of the song. The concept is masterfully simple and the execution exquisite.
In his website, c82.net, he explains in detail the process of creating these visualizations and you can find them in a poster format. He used MuseScore to process the scores and NodeBox to visualize them and generate the animations. Very interesting!
I believe that Data Visualization will be one of the key disciplines in the future. On the one hand, because the technical complexity to which we are going can only be democratized through the creation of layers that offer a simple but powerful experience to the end user. On the other hand, in order to handle and use the high volume of data we have (and it’s exponentially growing) it will be necessary not only to have powerful tools for exploitation, but also for visualization. For those who want to learn more about this subject, I recommend a programming language, Processing, and the free course of Creative Coding by Monash University.
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