soundsieve

A music browser that shows pictures of the audio inside the songs you listen to every day.

soundsieve is a music visualizer that takes the intrinsic qualities of a musical piece – pitch, time, and timbre – and makes their patterns readily apparent in a visual manner. For example, you can quickly pick out repeating themes, chords, and complexity from the pictures and video.

It’s a new, informative way to look at your music. It allows you to explore the audio structure of any song, and will be a new way to interact with your whole music library, enabling you to navigate the entire space of musical sound.

The current form of soundsieve is a music browser (like iTunes), that lets you see visual representations of any MP3 you own. You select a song, and see a set of pictures of the piece’s audio structure. Then you can choose to play the song, and see real-time visualizations accompanying the piece.

The easiest way to see what soundsieve is like is to watch a short video:

For more information on how the visuals are created, see my page on Visualizing Music.

Please feel free to comment on the project on my blog.

Copyright © 2008 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved.