Musical Lineation

Screen_shot_2012-06-26_at_2

My project Musical Lineation is a data visualization of musical scores by New York musicians displayed through a New York skyline. My idea behind it was to display the music of New York through the beauty of New York City.

I used Processing to create a program that takes input from an .xls file. To create these I took .midi files and passed them through another program, MIDIanal, and then converted from .csv to .xls using Microsoft Excel. 

I used the XlsReader library by Florian Jenett to parse the input and read the score. 

With this data I created a skyline in Processing. Each building of the skyline represents one bar of music. The height of the building is worked out due to the number of notes in the bar, complexity of the notes and a few other factors. The width of all the buildings was based on the temp/time signature of the music. Each building was given a roof. These roofs were designed by me and were based off real roofs of New York skyscrapers. 

Once this skyline was created I then took it into photoshop to add all the extra effects. The lights of the buildings were created by taking 3 different aerial images of New York City and filtering them. The first filter was the Glowing Edges filter which highlights the edges of color and removes everything else. This was then accentuated by applying a patchwork texture onto the images. These images were then cut out into the same shapes as the skyline code. I then duplicated these images and applied a Gaussian Blur to the one underneath. This just removes the harshness of the edges of buildings, allowing them to fade into the background, whilst preserving the light boundaries. 

The background color was created by using a gradient from pink to a darker pink, not quite black. The entire image was then dulled down by applying my own texture on top. This texture was created by taking 100 album covers from New York artists and layering them on top of themselves at 1% opacity. This created a really interesting unique texture which symbolized the music industry of New York. Some artists included: The Velvet Underground, The Wu Tang Clan, 50 Cent, The New York Dolls, H20, Anthrax, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and many more. This texture dulled down the background and unintentionally created these cloud/smog looking patterns in the sky. It also dimmed the lights on the buildings and made them look more sporadic and sparse.

The three songs I used for the final composition were Empire State of Mind by Jay Z, Antisocial by Anthrax and You Only Live Once by The Strokes. These songs are very different from each other in genre, style, tempo and structure so they complement and contrast very well.

 

http://www.tima.uk.com/midianal.htm

http://bezier.de/processing/libs/xls/