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Music Repetition in Graphics

Here's a random one for a Wednesday morning. An artist named Martin Wattenberg has put together a method of showing the repetition in a song. You feed his algorithm a MIDI file and it will produce a graphic that looks like this:

like_a_praye.gif
Madonna's Like a Prayer

Not particularly useful, per se, but I found the shapes and images to be fascinating. More information about how the algorithm works can be found here and the tool itself is in java here. The link to the tool also includes a bunch of the MIDI files he's used so you can see the results on a wide range of songs.

Found via Music Thing

Comments

Man I remember having to make these for homework in my college music theory classes. A clever implementation with MIDI, but not the first computer implementation I've seen.

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