furia furialog · Every Noise at Once · New Particles · The War Against Silence · Aedliga (songs) · photography · other things
Every Noise at Once has long existed in shades of gray. This isn't because I don't like colors. I've actually tried a few different ways to add color, mostly through inelegant expedients, but none of them seemed to me to be adding more clarity than confusion.  

I'm not entirely certain this one doesn't also suffer that flaw, but in the spirit of experimentation, I'm going to go ahead and publish it. If it makes us unhappy, I can always go back to gray. So here:  


The idea is to semi-subliminally surface some of the other analytical dimensions from the underlying music space, beyond the two that drive the XY axes, so that there's a little less visual flattening.  

For example, in the section on the right, above, you can see the reddish color running from "garage punk blues" to "experimental rock" to "more classic garage rock" and "psychedelic blues-rock", and the light blue linking "alternative new age" to "abstract" to "new tribe". These are good associative threads.  

And the maps within each genre (psychedelic blues-rock on the left, below, and abstract on the right) show both overall corresponding tints, and variable degrees of internal uniformity:  


Logistically, this works by mapping three additional acoustic metrics into the red, green and blue color-channels. I arrived at this particular combination through not-at-all-exhaustive experimentation, so maybe I'll come up with a better one, but for the moment red is energy, green is dynamic variation, and blue is instrumentalness. I don't recommend trying to think too hard about this, as the combinatory effects are kind of hard to parse, but it gives your eye things to follow. As data-presentation this is rather undisciplined, but as computational evocation it seems potentially interesting nonetheless.  

Which you could say of music, too.
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