Sound and visuals of a 750 voice polyrhythm

Hello all,

I’ve written a short article about visualising rhythm that uses code from Supercollider and P5JS that is written for a general audience. Just below the top image is a 14 minute audio of 750 polyrhythms that contains some interesting patterns and sound movements. Some of the other examples produce pleasing results too.

Many thanks,

Dom

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Very interesting article, and the 14-minute version sounds fantastic! I think you are onto something with this line:

Perhaps computers are facilitating the construction of an additional visual language for music that could help provide imaginative leaps and provoke new musical ideas.

This is already happening in a way, as I believe the state-of-the-art generative AIs are relying mostly on spectrograms to train neural networks. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before they find new visual patterns that are pleasing to the ear.

I am also reminded of this previous thread exploring the idea of using SC code to generate visually appealing spectrograms.

Thanks for the kind words PitchTrebler!

I have not yet had a chance to check out the thread you shared, but I will.

That’s very interesting about using spectrograms to train neural networks. I’ve always been most attracted to imagery that describes music in ways that makes sense to the human mind. The majority of visualisation seems to come from audio signals which I find hard to translate into something musically intelligible. The idea that “AI” might do this to fruitful ends makes more sense.