November 9th, 2007
MilkDrop
I have been a fan of music visualization software since 1996 when I purchased a new computer with a Matrox Millennium video card and a beautiful 17 inch Trinitron display. A very simple form of turning sound into a visual format is an oscilloscope. An oscilloscope is used to create a visual representation of alternating electrical voltage which happens to be the way we transmit audio signals from to speakers and from microphones.
The Color of Music
No one can question the impact of the music video on popular culture. Even as an art form the music video is a visual representation of music. A relevant difference between a music video or a laser light show and a computer based visualization is in the orchestration. The videography is a performed interpretation of the music in question. However the software visualization is a direct translation of the music into a visual form.
MilkDrop
In an A friend of mine reintroduced me to MilkDrop and Ryan Geiss. Ryan’s skill is one of the pioneers of music visualization software and has had a strong hand in some of NVidia best GPU demo software. He recently released MilkDrop2 in October of 2007 which was released to help commemorate the 10th anniversary of WinAmp. For Mac OSX on iTunes, there is fortunately a rough option to be found at projectM. This SourceForge based open source software project has a port of MD. Simply download the file and save it to your username/Library/iTunes/iTunesPlug-ins.