It's one thing to see the raw files of a song on ProTools or GarageBand, but web developer Paul Lewis, aka Aerotwist, decided to up the ante and made a site that maps song frequencies in a dial shape. Meet MusicDNA, a simple-yet-awesome tool that creates 360° representations of tracks where each "slice of the song's pie" is colored and distorted based on the active frequencies at that point in the song.Take, for example, Kanye West's "Bound 2":Now here's the frequency DNA for the Charlie Wilson-sampling track:
For comparison, we tested out a tech-house track by the (awesome) underground producer DJ Richard:The ring looks a bit more…contained?
According to a blog post from Lewis, he had to "pick values for the audio gain and so on that favors professionally-mastered pop and electronic. The downside is it doesn't work as well for quiet or loud music." That might explains why a warehouse-shaking techno banger looks somewhat neater than Kanye's viral sensation. To our surprise—and because we couldn't help it—the digi-DNA for the glossiest of glossy pop jamz from 2013 looks near-identical to "Bound 2." Here's a before and after:
Interesting. Very interesting. These radio-friendly tunes seem to be sonic DNA brethren.Lewis explained that this app was easy to make, using just Web Audio API (which acts like a node graph) and an FFT analyzer (a real-time frequency measurement tool) that's simple to set up. He even explains how create your own app on his site.Now of course there are other artists and programmers who've created more futuristic projects to uniquely visualize music. Yet props to Lewis for building an awesome, DIY site during a 10-hour flight that sheds light on the innards of our favorite tunes.See Lewis' website for more coding goodness.@zachsokol
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