DSDN 142: Project 2

Structure and Noise

Research

I decided to further my research with sound by conducting my own cool little experiment. Since I looked into sound waves, it gave me the brilliant idea of looking into visualizers that were used in popular music players these days, like iTunes or Windows Media Player. So what I did is relating what I said in one of the previous post was the type of music and genre that the song is, can relate to either it being structured or just plain noisy. So I fired up iTunes on my Mac, I chose to experiment with the 'Classic Visualizer' instead of the new one, since the classic made more recognisable shapes and it felt like it understood the music better. 

Starting it off I chose to pick a classical song. I played the most calm song that I thought I had which was a beautiful piece by the famous Japanese pianist Yiruma. I chose his song 'River Flows In You' and to my surprise, iTunes gave me this visualizer of what pretty much looks like a river flowing in me! What are the chances. But as we can see here it is a very calm shape, 2 colours have been used and it's almost repeated through out the whole screen. There is nothing noisy about this, especially if you're listening to the song at the same time.

With the second song, I had to pick something that I thought was going to give me a noisy image. Of course I chose dubstep as the genre and ended up picking Skrillex's song 'Kyoto'. Straight away I wasn't surprised when the first thing that came up was this image below. We can definitely tell that this is not a calm song. It created wavy shapes everywhere with different shades of colour, along with a blurry background that didn't make sense. 

As we can see from this little experiment that I had conducted, that sound too can have both structure and noise. By just looking at these 2 images, you don't even have to have heard the song before to know what they sound like. But also an interesting factor that captured my attention was that the first image I thought, can easily be transformed into the second one. This would be great to use as an example for my coding, working with something that looks like sound waves or a visualizer to create a cool looking final. 

If you want to hear the songs from these artist to know what and why I conducted this little experiment, I have added 2 links here that will take you to youtube so you can listen to the difference and will get you to understand completely my point. 

[Yiruma - River Flows In You] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMBXk5GngmY
[Skrillex - Kyoto] - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86khmc6y1yE