I'm proposing a talk for TEDx Waterloo. The subject is Light + Music, an overview of visual music, the past and future, of this wonderful field where two of your senses get together and jam and have a good time.

The theme of TEDxWaterloo this year is Tomorrow Started Yesterday, which is pretty appropriate for this subject. The visualization of music certainly started with dance, which was probably one of the most ancient of human arts, although we cannot say for certain when it started. Music certainly existed over 50,000 years ago. On the other side, the future of music is certainly digital, and the digital signal lends itself to being interpreted in multiple ways—witness mp3 visualizers and VJs.

But I want to start with what is sound. In 1904 Heinrich Rubens created a tube to see the sound as light—literally—glowing from the flames of his curious contraption:

Sound is a wave through the air, and like all waves you can reduce it to a sum of waves at different frequencies. I won't get into sine waves and circles and cycles and oscillators because I don't have the time. But take waves of different speeds, some large and slow, others small and fast—just like in water—and add them up, you get sound. The rube's tube simply shows the amplitude and pitch of the wave as it creates a standing wave inside the tube.

An oscilloscope does the same thing!

Guess what, your iTunes visualizer does the same thing too. It just jazzes up that information into prettier pictures. The basic ones show an oscilloscope like the ruben's tube, or a "spectrogram" which provides much more information—it actually breaks down the signal into the component sine waves, and shows the strength of each. Usually frequency is vertical, time is horizontal, and the intensity of colour is the intensity of sound at that pitch. Here's a spectrogram of a violin:

And here's a video of a whiz-bang mp3 visualizer. It may look crazy but it's just oscilloscope + spectrograph driving it:

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Maybe you can look at the spectrogram and tell a flute from an electric guitar, but most people can't. That's why Anita Lillie made a program that tries to show the timbre of different instruments in colour against the notes of the scale. This is where the future of direct visualization is going:

Visualizing Music by Anita Lillie from S Woodside on Vimeo.

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All of that said… there is more to visual music than can be imagined by computers. Artists will surely have a word to say. And we can go back to the early days of film to find inspiration from Len Lye, famous for his abstract film, A Colour Box (1935):

And you might have already seen this one. Fantasia: Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor, by Oskar Fischinger in 1940!

There is much more, such as the Star Gate sequence in Kubrick's 2001, Lapis by James Whitney, The Bead Game by Ishu Patel, Synchromy No. 4: Escape by Mary Ellen Bute in 1938. Bret Battey's Luna Series #3: Sinus Aestum is more recent—2009. After three quarters of a century, the art is being revived.

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Tomorrow though, it will be the other way around. Instead of looking at sound, you can go the other way, you make light and get sound.

The most significant entry in this green field is surely TENORI-ON, a completely new form of digital instrument created by Toshio Iwai and Yu Nishibori for Yamaha in Japan. It's being used in concert by artists such as Little Boots. I would like to leave you with these two examples, which might blow your mind.

Little Boots .. watch her set it up :-) :

Jim O'Rourke ... a little deeper, but stick with it and your mind will expand. Steve Reich needed 18 musicians! :

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I've skipped over a lot of really cool stuff, so if you want to see more in a fast, wide-ranging and crazy presentation, head over to TEDx Waterloo and nominate me for the show :-) I might even do some live demos :-)