Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

Have you ever visualized a song while listening? On my drive in this morning, I heard “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” by Styx, and was inspired to write about this topic today. In “Fooling Yourself”, there are two punchy synthesizer solos that dance up and down the scale with a rather unique rhythm. It’s the sort of melody that my mind can’t help playing with visually on the projector in the back of my brain (luckily the screen doesn’t obscure my view of the road).

The iTunes visualizer

I’m pretty sure that how one visualizes a song varies from person to person and song to song. My best evidence for this comes from my experience as part of Sounds and Visions, a computer music and graphics concert put on by the UIUC chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Unfortunately, the web was young back then and we didn’t put much material online. But you can think of it as a zanily creative iTunes visualizer. My contribution was a dancing solar system with a sun that pulsed to the beat and planets excited by notes of various frequencies. Others showcased flocks of birds, a carpet of tiles bouncing little cubes into the air, only to be eaten by alligator-like creatures, and quivering leaf-like fractals.

I just realized that I have no idea where I’m going with this post… maybe I’ll just end it with a question… what other visual expressions of music have you seen?

It has come to my attention that the tweets are out of the bag about the new interactive admissions map on the IMA dashboard. The map is a mashup of our admissions data using the Google Maps API and a zip code demographics resource called ZIPskinny. I thought that I would take some time today to discuss the art and science of colormap selection that went into developing this visualization.

Read the rest of this entry »

ArtBabble officially launched in the IMA Davis LAB one month ago today.  We have been attentively watching the invites that have been sent and accepted since that time.  To date, almost exactly one out of every three invites has been accepted.  Without a baseline it’s hard to say whether this is good or bad, but hey… we’ll take it.  A few days ago, Daniel posted a chart showing the number of new users per day on ArtBabble.  I would like to share some visualizations of the invites as of this morning.

You can click on any of the graphs to get a larger view.  The points in the graph are all ArtBabble users.  The lines between the points represent an invite that was sent.  The top point in this graph represents a fake user, “ArtBabble”, that has “invited” all the first tier of users.  The blue lines represent these pseudo-invites.  The red lines represent an invite that was sent and has not yet been accepted.  Finally, the green lines represent an invite that was sent and accepted.  This graph also lets us easily see that the longest invite chain included six people.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »