HD Visualisations

CUDA Music Visualisation / CUDA Visualization

In: CUDA Music Visualization|Full HD|HD Music Visualization|Music Visualisation

If you haven’t already heard the word is no longer ‘bird’ its now CUDA. CUDA is going to be big. Scratch that CUDA is already big.

What is CUDA? well essentially there is two big computer graphics cards producers – ATI (that makes the RADEON cards most notably) and NVIDIA. The battle between these two is as virulent as any other human 2 sided fight, the balance for power swings one way to the other switching between each company with new series of cards just outdoing the other. This is ongoing and gamers fight it out constantly. This is not important. What’s important is that they seem to have split with their intentions for their high end graphics cards.

ATI seem to be putting a lot of R+D money into multiscreen – that is if you wanted to stick 3 screens in a line and play a more immersive version of a game ATI cards would arguably be better. Of course the finer details of this are not specific and I am no graphics card geek so I could be off the mark with this. Again ATI cards are good at the moment but this is not important.

Whats important is NVIDIA’s CUDA. CUDA is in short the opening up of the graphics card to programmers. CUDA allows programmers to use the brute force of these horrifically fast new graphics cards to run programs of their own creation. Think a cross between cutting edge graphics capacity and open source freedom. In short CUDA will allow cutting edge CUDA Music Visualisations, or at least it will in theory. To play about with Nvidia’s CUDA all you need is a fairly modern nvidia card (I think cards from about £300 currently upwards all are CUDA enabled) and a bit of programming skill. There are some fantastic developments already coming out of this new freedom of access to these new cards – the higher end new Nvidia cards that are about to hit (480GTX etc) will have some ridiculous number of cores like 512 – essentially making them more powerful than 10′s of current home computers…in one graphics card.

So with a bit of luck some of you fantastic graphics programmers (and perhaps I will even get some time at the end of the summer) will start writing some fantastic hd music visualisations in CUDA. If anyone see’s CUDA music visualizations online anywhere or at any gigs please do comment here!

Anyway watch this space people – YES YES NVIDIA CUDA MUSIC VISUALISATIONS (VISUALIZATIONS if your coming from the US!)

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Current Music Visualisation

In: Browser Based|Music Visualisation

There are a few notable music visualisation works in current times, or rather that I have found in my investigations. SoulWire.co.uk has written a quite nice action-script 3 (flash) based music visualisation engine that works very nicely (nice choice of track to demonstrate it with too.) I like the avenues of animation flash opens up to visualisations and its long developed actionscript does allow a good platform for translating code into visuals, but while I believe a lot of amazing music visualisation can be produced using flash I do think that a more beefy technology would allow a bigger scope, its worth noting though that with the browser as a piece of grey, box software becoming less and less of a reality it is potentially past the times of browsers being restrictive to production, 3d graphics and rendering.

While there are certain advantages to having everything available in a browser (Quake live, 3d product catalog’s etc are all good) I do think it means a convergence between the OS and the browser in years to come, for now however and for my pursuits into full hd music visualisations a more 3D strong platform will be chosen. As well as using flash its also worth citing the example of using just Javascript (and canvas from html5) to provide some quite impressive music visualisations, like this example from nihilogic.dk

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Spotify Visualisations

In: Full HD|HD Music Visualization|Music Visualisation|Spotify Visualisations

This website, in its entirety was started out of a single ideal. How can music be better visualised? Technology is developing in leaps and bounds but far too often rather cool ideas get left in the destructive wrath only to be mildly progressed. Music visualisation is one of these. There are a few people progressing it along but the mass of work on music visualization was done in the late 1990′s and hasn’t really been widely developed upon since. As technology gives us more means of visualisation though, and as music becomes a different medium (enter spotify) visualisations can develop too.

Why doesn’t spotify have visualisations (visualizations if your american)? – This is a good question, but really their reasoning is probably to maintain a core business and not progress to cloudy boundaries, which is sensible. We want more than to offer visualisation’s for spotify though, why can’t all audio be visualized?

This blog will be a work in progress. A step into the unknown and a progressive investigation, development and story surrounding music visualisation. With such great high definition televisions commonplace and projector technology developing fantastically (for example pico projector’s) now is the time to get some stunning full hd visualisation going. If you would like to aid this pursuit, are already doing so or just think the idea is cool – please support us by reading this blog regularly, following us on twitter and most importantly of all – offering us your ideas and discussing the medium.

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