Visualizing the Sound: A Journey into Heavy Metal Music
Since joining EPAM Systems Ukraine, I’ve had the chance to attend a range of both internal and external events hosted on wearecommunity.io.
One day, I came across an intriguing event description that caught my attention. It promised a deep dive into the evolution of the heavy metal genre and its impact on society and culture. While my interest in rock and metal music had taken a back seat since my teenage years, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to revisit it and explore it further. Here is where our story began.
A Brief History of Heavy Metal Music
The host of the event, Oleksandr Balytskyi, Lead Software Engineer at EPAM, shared in detail his own experience with Ukrainian and worldwide Heavy Metal music and provided an in-depth introduction to the history of this music genre. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, I would suggest watching the movie «Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005)» and reading «Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal» by Ian Christe.
Heavy metal music originated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, largely in the United Kingdom and the United States. The sound of heavy metal was influenced by the industrial, working-class areas of the UK, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, where steel factories were prevalent (The History of Metal Music). The pioneers of heavy metal, including Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple, were inspired by the sounds of these factories, as well as the chunky guitar riffs of early 60s British blues rock bands.
Over the years, heavy metal has diversified into numerous sub-genres, each with its own distinct characteristics. Here are some of the most prominent sub-genres:
- Death Metal
- Doom Metal
- Glam Metal
- Goth Metal
- Groove Metal
- Power Metal
- Progressive Metal
- Symphonic Metal
- Thrash Metal
- more
Personal Challenge
During that time, I participated in Visual Mentoring with my great mentor, Iryna Shkarovska, Associate Director at EPAM, which naturally sparked the idea for the next design challenge.
The challenge was meant to answer the question: How can we visualize songs from different metal sub-genres to showcase their unique characteristics? An additional requirement was to illustrate the songs using a data visualization technique. So I began with a quick research into how people have visualized music over the years.
The Way of Visualising Things
For sure, the obvious and most accurate way to notate music is through Musical notation. But are there any alternative ways, perhaps not as precise in note-taking but effective in interpreting music?
Next, I will present several examples from creative or even scientific fields to illustrate the various ways people attempt to interpret music visually.
Spoiler: You can find more of these examples in the “Additional Materials” section.
Color & Music
There are numerous records of modernist and contemporary artists who looked to music as inspiration for new forms of creative expression. One of the most popular concepts for artists and scientists to explore is the connection between music and color.
Over two centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton puzzled over the nature of light and its relationship to sound. Newton associated each of the seven colors that he saw in prismatic light with the seven notes of the harmonic scale.
The idea of relating the notes of the musical scale (C, D, E, F, G, A, B) to various colors occurred many times over the succeeding two centuries (Figure). However, there are some problems with these scales. One big issue is that they don’t consider how differently we perceive visual and audio information. A pattern that sounds harmonious doesn’t necessarily look harmonious.
Later on, attempts to connect music and color evolved into the art synesthesia movement, which involved a wide variety of artists’ experiments exploring the cooperation of the senses, such as seeing and hearing. Incidentally, this art movement wasn’t just about creative self-expression for artists; it’s actually a medical phenomenon that was recorded as early as 1812.
Music as a Dance Performance
Dance performance is another ancient way for people to interpret music. Throughout history, various cultures around the world have used dance as a form of artistic expression of music, conveying emotions, stories, and cultural traditions through movement.
Recently, I found a perfect example of a choreography performance that gave me insight into how dance serves as both interpretation and visualization of music through the artist’s subjective perspective.
This example is the music video by Daft Punk “Around the World”. It is a unique music visualization experiment, creatively translating the song’s instrument tracks into visual representations. Directed by Michel Gondry, the video features five groups of characters symbolizing different instruments in the song:
- robots for the singing voice
- athletes for the bass guitar
- disco girls for the high-pitched keyboard
- skeletons for the guitar line
- mummies for the drum machine
Computer Graphics
With the advent of the oscilloscope and the continual advancement of digital technologies, sound visualization has undergone a significant transformation. Today, the most prevalent approach to representing audio data is through waveforms and spectrograms.
A waveform represents sound as a plot of amplitude (loudness) against time, displaying the variation of sound intensity over time. It’s essentially a graph showing how the sound wave changes over time.
Spectrogram is usually depicted as a heat map. It is a three-dimensional visual representation of speech. It shows time horizontally, frequency vertically, and intensity.
Visual Storytelling
Next, the focus shifted to devising an appropriate data visualization solution. The challenge lies in the fact that data visualization relies heavily on analyzing vast amounts of information to present trends, outliers, and patterns in data in an accessible manner. However, the current restriction of the visual mentoring task was to illustrate only three songs. Therefore, I decided to compare songs from various metal bands and, by unveiling their musical patterns, showcase the uniqueness of each band’s style.
The metal bands that I have chosen to work with:
- Deep Purple — UK rock/heavy metal band formed in London in 1967
- System of a Down — Armenian-American heavy metal band, formed in 1994
- Nightwish — Finnish symphonic metal band, formed in 1996
Step-by-Step Process of Analysing Song Data
It was necessary to develop a custom algorithm of actions to define the data and workflow, which would enable me to illustrate the song effectively and compare visualizations of the songs later on. After some brainstorming, I came up with the following variables suitable for visualization:
- Song timeline
- Song structure
- Types of instruments and vocal tracks
- Intensity level of sound per instrument
- Sound intensity of each instrument per song section
Defining axises
One of the most common applications for visualizing data is to see the change in value for a variable across time. In my case, one axis was quite obvious: the song timeline. As for the second axis, I opted to represent instruments and vocal tracks. Additionally, the song timeline was segmented to reflect the song’s structure like intro, verse 1, chorus, verse 2 … outro. Quick spoiler here: all the songs I previously selected for comparison had unique compositions.
Map the Data
The process of mapping data was as natural as it could be. This means that I relied on my own perception of music (thanks to the skills I gained in music school) to map each of the instrumental tracks and their sound intensity. To make this process a little bit easier, I generated a waveform and spectrogram of each song, allowing me to review the levels of sound intensity and its frequencies.
Visualise Variables
In order to visualize data visual variables could be used, such as position, size, shape, opacity, color, texture, orientation, line thickness, and multiplying elements. Or even mix some of it!
For this work, I experimented with simple forms such as transparency and layer blending. As a result of this experimentation, I mapped the data into formats like heat maps, bar charts, and overlapping area charts. Below, you can see some examples of these.
Alternative Options
While working on my own concepts, I was constantly searching for references and more ideas. That’s when I stumbled upon the Hooktheory website, which aims to help musicians write music and gain a practical understanding of how music works. On this website, I discovered another cool way to visualize music records based on a data and metric system.
The defined Hooktheory’s metric system includes Chord Complexity, Melodic Complexity, Chord-Melody Tension, Chord Progression Novelty, and Chord Bass Melody scores.
To visualize the score data, the Radar Chart (also known as a Polar chart, Star Plot, Web Chart, or Spider Chart) could be a perfect solution. Take a look at the image below to see what scores each of the selected songs received.
The data on the charts says that significantly more complex than the typical song, and compared to the selected songs, is “Chop Suey” by System of a Down. It has above-average scores in all 5 metrics scores. In terms of chords and melody, “Wish I Had An Angel” by Nightwish is more basic than the typical song, having below-average scores in 4 out of 5 metrics. “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple has higher complexity than the average song in terms of Melodic Complexity and Chord-Melody Tension scores.
Scores on the chart don’t correlate with the quality of the songs and don’t indicate whether a song is good or bad. From my perspective, they rather indicate how common or unique each song will sound on average compared to others.
Final Visuals
The final visuals took the form of posters, created by blending patterns of data visualization, including bar charts and heat maps. The color scheme for each song was chosen based on the distinctive visual characteristics of the musical bands:
- The poster for Deep Purple’s song featured a purple-magenta palette to highlight the band’s name.
- The poster for System of a Down was rendered in vibrant red-orange tones to reflect the intensity of the band’s music.
- The palette for the Nightwish poster was inspired by the band’s origin in Finland and also captured the general mood of the gothic metal genre.
1. Deep Purple, «Smoke on the Water»
Band Genres: psychedelic rock (early years), heavy metal, hard rock, progressive rock
Song Released: 1973
Harmony & Tonality: blues scale, G minor
Instruments: electric guitar, organ, drumset, bass guitar
About the song:
The song’s lyrics are based on true events, chronicling the 1971 fire at Montreux Casino in Montreux, Switzerland.
It is considered the band’s signature song, with the guitar riff being one of the most iconic in rock music history. The song’s central theme, developed by guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, is a four-note blues scale melody in G minor, harmonized in parallel fourths.
The lyrics of “Smoke on the Water” tell the true story of Deep Purple’s experience in Montreux, Switzerland, where a fire broke out during a Frank Zappa concert, destroying the casino complex. The title of the song refers to the smoke rising from the fire at the casino.
2. System of a Down, «Chop Suey!»
Band Genres: heavy metal, thrash metal, alternative metal, nu metal, progressive metal, etc
Song Released: 2001
Harmony & Tonality: G Minor, and G Phrygian
Instruments: electric guitar, drums, bass guitar
About the song:
The song features a unique combination of styles, including operatic vocals, punk vocals, screaming, metal guitars, funk guitars, pop structures, and rock drums.
The song deals with themes of life and death, and it has been interpreted as a commentary on suicide and the way people are judged after their death. The lyrics include references to the Bible and the Armenian Genocide.
The song has reached one billion views on YouTube and is considered one of the band’s signature songs.
3. Nightwish, «Wish I had an Angel»
Band Genres: Symphonic metal, power metal, folk metal, gothic metal
Song Released: 2004
Harmony & Tonality: E Minor
Instruments: electric guitar, synthesizer, drums, bass guitar
About the song:
The song features the band’s signature blend of heavy guitars, soaring vocals, and orchestral arrangements. It is considered a classic of the symphonic metal genre and has been performed live numerous times.
The lyrics of the song deal with themes of love, loss, and the search for meaning in life. Also, it made it onto two U.S. film soundtracks. It reached #60 in the UK Singles Chart, the highest of any of the band’s singles in the UK.
References
- We are community — platform for online events owned by EPAM systems
- “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey (2005)” — the movie about the history of heavy metal music
- “Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal” — book by Ian Christe
- The History of Metal Music — article
- Musical notation — Wikipedia
- Synesthesia movement — Wikipedia
- Medical phenomenon — Wikipedia
- “Around the World” — music video by Daft Punk
- Waveforms and Spectrograms — Youtube
- Spectrogram — Wikipedia
- Heat map — Wikipedia
- Heatmap chart — Atlassian
- Bar chart — Atlassian
- Overlapping area chart — Atlassian
- Hooktheory — website for music writers and music lovers
- Radar chart — Diagrammm website, an online source of data visualization grammar, made in Ukraine
Additional Materials
Videos
- An Optical Poem — visual experiment produced by Oskar Fischinger 1938
- Visualizing Music — discussion panel, the Ohio State University College of Arts and Science
Articles & Research Papers
- Visualizing music with the help of light painting — article
- Hearing color, seeing sound: The relation between sound and visual, and music and art — article
- Music as a multidisciplinary art: The exchange of music and visual elements, and the role of the participants — research paper
- Field of Sound — kinetic installation translates sound waves into motion
