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Topic: Need a visualisation creation helper tool (Read 1676 times) previous topic - next topic
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Need a visualisation creation helper tool

The idea goes like this: I have a photo with a series of identical objects. Each object has 2 states, active and inactive. I want to assign a sound to each of the objects and play a song with them...but I really have no idea even where to start. I think I need something that could break the melody into individual sounds and write a script of what should be active when. Is there anything like this?

Or maybe there is some totally different way to do it?

Need a visualisation creation helper tool

Reply #1
If you mean some sort of stop-motion animation as a really odd-but-fun visualisation, I guess there are two general approaches:

- sprite-based: cut out all the objects separately and update them to the music.
- create a large set of photographs with all possible on/off combinations. Every object added to the photo will obviously double the amount of required photos.

A consideration: A pie cannot be unbaked, and music cannot be unmixed to instruments. Writing software that can partially recognize instruments from timbre/pitch/tone/whathaveyou is not an easy thing. There may be something like that out there, but connecting it to a visualisation of the kind you want is another beast altogether.

What may be a lot "easier", is photographing a row of stacks of coloured blocks, which update as a sort of physical spectrum visualiser. It's completely doable in 3D (and has been done many times before. Have a look at the bandcamp visualisers), but using photographs might have its own charm.

 

Need a visualisation creation helper tool

Reply #2
Thanks for the answer.
If you mean some sort of stop-motion animation as a really odd-but-fun visualisation, I guess there are two general approaches:

- sprite-based: cut out all the objects separately and update them to the music.
- create a large set of photographs with all possible on/off combinations. Every object added to the photo will obviously double the amount of required photos.

To be more precise, there will be a photochopped image with a series of traffic lights. The are supposed to light up to the music, so animation is extremely simple, each object can be either on or off. The person who would be doing it isn't concerned about technicalities related to graphics (though I don't know how does he intent to do it), but about the music part. He to gave me visualisations as an example of something close enough to consider it's feasible. He was also talking that he doubts that what he called "synchronized visualisations" (my translation from Polish) are being done manually and there are sure some tools for it. I'm a total noob when it comes to these things...

A consideration: A pie cannot be unbaked, and music cannot be unmixed to instruments. Writing software that can partially recognize instruments from timbre/pitch/tone/whathaveyou is not an easy thing. There may be something like that out there, but connecting it to a visualisation of the kind you want is another beast altogether.

What may be a lot "easier", is photographing a row of stacks of coloured blocks, which update as a sort of physical spectrum visualiser. It's completely doable in 3D (and has been done many times before. Have a look at the bandcamp visualisers), but using photographs might have its own charm.

I saw the bandcamp thing and it's totally what I want. Is there a tool that creates such visualisations from arbitrary music with a configurable number of bars? I think it would do...