[MusicViz Project] Part 3 - Breakdown of FFMPEG "showcqt" Experiment

This is the third installment of my ongoing series of posts on one of my long-term projects to develop a new automated technique for visualising music.

To motivate today's discussion, here is the final video clip rendered from the experimental technique being discussed in this post: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTMpzmdI9qQ

 

And here is the command used to render that:

ffmpeg -y -i 20230803-v02.flac -filter_complex "[0:a]showcqt=s=500x1920:axis=0:cscheme=0.6|0.7|0.1|0.1|0.8|0.5,crop=500:1392:0:4000,setsar=1,transpose=2[vcqt]; [0:a]showwaves=mode=cline:s=1920x100[vs]; [vcqt][vs]overlay=y=H-100[v]" -map "[v]" -map "0:a" -c:a aac "mv_20230803.mp4"

 

Let's annotate that to show the different parts more clearly (see the breakdown following this for a rough description of what each part does):

ffmpeg -y -i 20230803-v02.flac -filter_complex "[0:a]showcqt=s=500x1920:axis=0:cscheme=0.6|0.7|0.1|0.1|0.8|0.5,crop=500:1392:0:4000,setsar=1,transpose=2[vcqt]; [0:a]showwaves=mode=cline:s=1920x100[vs]; [vcqt][vs]overlay=y=H-100[v]" -map "[v]" -map "0:a" -c:a aac "mv_20230803.mp4"

[MusicViz Project] Part 2 - Motivations + Rough Directions

This is Part 2 of what will hopefully be a series of posts documenting my attempts to build a music visualiser for automatically creating interesting dynamic visualisations for my back-catalogue of music I've been writing + recording of the past few years. Last time I checked, in total there's probably somewhere between 3 and 5 hours of "finished" or "presentable" tracks, with most averaging about 1 minute in length (most come in under that around 52-55 seconds), with only a few reaching 1:10 mins, and only 2-3 blowing out to ~2:30 mins.

Most notably, there are 2 playlists (or really "albums" by this point) of material I produced during the few months I was holed up in my room writing my thesis. During most of the day and night, I'd be listening to these playlists while slaving away in my text editor, desperately trying to make some progress (some days much more successfully than others); and then, to take a break / recharge, I'd write or record some music based on fragments that would come to mind. Rinse and repeat for several months. As my thesis grew, so too did these playlists, which each ended up over an hour long in the end.

For several years, I've been wanting to package these up in a suitable format to release into the world. Currently, only a small handful of these tracks have been heard by anyone other than myself, but certainly not the entirety of these playlists in their totality. Yes, granted, the expected audience is probably vanishingly small, as they are certainly not "mainstream", and don't fall neatly into established categories... hence, even if/when I do release these, I hardly expect many people to actually listen. Then again, if anyone's interested, I have actually since produced a few more hours of similar / evolved material since then LOL - heck, I'm listening to one of the newer playlists as I write this, and even I am surprised by some of the material I recorded even a few years ago.

[Music Viz Project] First Version of Pitch-To-Colours Mapping

After procrastinating over this for a few years, I've finally put together a first version of a mapping for the colours I typically associate with each pitch - one of the key elements for the music visualisations I've always wanted to generate for all the music I've been writing + recording over the past few years.

This is actually my second attempt at putting together such a chart. The first one (which I can't seem to find right now) was only partially complete, as at the time, I kept struggling over whether I'd picked the perfectly calibrated shades for each, which then meant I never got the basics down.

 

So without further ado, here's a rough chart:

 

 (Disclaimer: I wanted to clean it up more, but Musescore doesn't let me easily insert/delete excess notes in the middle of a line without re-entering the notes and then losing the colours. So... meh!)