What if I told you you could draw with ?

MIDI art, and other forms of audio GFX

MIDI notes pixel art

MIDI ???

So there's this thing called MIDI, which stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface. I won't get into any technical details, you just need to know that it's a way to make sound with a computer. You can usually write musical pieces with specific softwares called DAWs.

MIDI art ???

When composing, the notes are displayed on a grid, which can be seen as a canvas. From there on, we can start making pixel art ! The best part is, you can customize each note with a certain sound and create a very unique sounding pixel art.

DEMO !!!!

Here are a few examples of MIDI art pieces :

A simple pixel art

A more complex drawing

This one was also made to sound coherent !

~ Oscilloscopes and stuff ~

Waveform art

So you know how sound is just a wave ? Well turns out you can shape that wave ! I won't get into some complicated math, but basically, the most simple wave is a sine wave, a nice, smooth, round wave, repeating itself as regularly as possible. Using the previously mentioned complicated math, you can shape the waveform to your liking and create some unique designs.

However, waveform art has a rather cumbersome limitation : Since we are using a mathematical functions (and graphing it in cartesian coordinates, the line can only go right and up or down. This means we can never loop back and go left : to put it simply, this method allows us to draw the letter 'V', but not the letter 'O'. The good part is, other methods allow us to remedy this problem.

Messing around with oscilloscopes

Oscilloscopes are very basic electronic devices, which take 2 signals in entry, and display them on a grid. You can fiddle with the entry signal to manipulate the visual output. But in our case the entry signal is duplicated to both left and right speakers. The process creates a very unique type of music, along with an interesting video clip. This genre was initiated by two polish composers/programmers. They ended up developing a software that functions alongside the Blender 3d modeling program, and outputs the corresponding signal to an oscilloscope. The project is better described on the >Oscilloscope Music< website.

Examples !!

Audio visualizers

Audio visualizers are graphical displays mostly used as a video complement to audio content. They illustrate the audio specter by graphing the audio frenquencies all through the audio media.

Graphs

Graphs are the most basic audio visualizers. Some are actually made of 2 graphs, displaying data for stereo audio (left and right channels), and some only show a single graph of the overall frequencies. An audio visualizer graph displays audio frequencies at any point in time, from low to high frequencies.

Circles

Circular audio visualizers are somewhat similar to graphs, usually representing both audio channels, and using the center of the circle to display a logo or some other image. Frequencies from low to high are represented from the bottom to the top, extending away from the center of the circle.

Windows Media Player

This one brings up a ton of nostalgia from back when Windows Media Player was still widely used (up until about 15 years ago).