PointMusicDisplay

[Danny]

=Point Music Displays=

//A point-light display is a simplified representation of biological motion consisting of a moving set of dots. A point music display utilizes a similar idea to create a simplified audio representation of musical motion consisting of a changing set of uncomplicated sonic objects.//

Here are some of my initial thoughts on this topic, with more to come soon. I will also be more actively maintaining information on these ideas on my website's [|Point Music Display Project page].

Ideas

 * Although a sonification of point light displays might result in an interesting model of biological motion, the direction of this project lies closer to the idea of simplified yet recognizable representations of musical structures in motion.

Analysis

 * Utilize Matlab to find musical structures within pieces of music. Attempt to track these structures (motives) through time and record their respective properties.
 * One possible method is to attach "detectors" to certain structurally important musical features and track their motion. This is the direct interpretation to the 3D point tracking used in the visual point light displays.
 * Ideally there would be time to tag these individual properties with descriptive names in order to create the ability to morph between several structure states.

Simplified auditory display

 * Although the auditory display portion of the project cannot be fully specified until the nature of the data is known, it is not hard to image a simple representation of more complex musical structures consisting of uncomplicated sonic objects. It is this step that may allow future tests examining these particular perceptual boundaries of musical structure.

Examples of point light displays

 * [|BLMWalker]
 * [|Dot movies]

[Jerry] Very interesting idea, Danny. So what kinds of "structural features" were/are you thinking about? What seems tricky here is that in each case you need to identify some kind of "invariant" and there also needs to be a space of "transformations" that preserve that invariant but allow the point representing that invariant a "space" through which it can meaningfully "move". So the devil is really in the details here ... what sorts of musical structures might fill this extraordinarily nontrivial bill?