Towards building an experiential music visualizer

There have been many attempts to represent music using a wide variety of different music visualisation schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel system architecture which combines Max/MSP (TM) with Flash (TM) that can be used to build real-time music visualisations rapidly. In addition, we have used this proposed architecture to develop a music visualisation scheme that uses individual notes from a MIDI keyboard or from a standard MIDI file and creates novel displays that reflect pitch, note duration, characteristics such as how hard a key is struck, and which instruments are playing at any one time. The proposed music visualization scheme is a first step towards developing a music visualization that alone can provide a sense of musical experience to the user.