Visualization

Recently I am pretty into information/data visualization. The idea is to explore some ways to visualize music in different levels. Level here means from within a song level to further the whole music collection level.

So the idea for visualization is to show something human might not be able to perceive if they are described in the old ways. For example, when you are listening to music, it is harder to tell the structure of the music (verse vs chorus, how many times the chorus got repeated, so on and so forth). However, those information can be easily shown by a simple 2-D plot. This is just one application and we believe that there are much more possibilities out there for exploration. If the plot does not mean anything, at least it needs to be beautiful and pleasant to see.

Just had a meeting with my adviser who also has an engineering background and claim that he does not really know about aesthetic. Oh well, neither do I... I just started to read the book "Visualizing Data" by Ben Fry, a guy from MIT media lab who did his PhD work in "Computational Information Design" and also the co-inventor of a well known visualization sketch tool called "Processing". I do not have much to discuss about the book yet, so far I can see that the whole process of visualizing data is laid out in the book. And I have played with processing a bit, pretty friendly and intuitive programming language.

Good start though, will see how far I can go, probably will go take one to two classes about visualization and graphical design next semester in order to learn the thinking process of a designer. Looking forward to it!