Audio Visualisation

BBC R&D @ Mashed

Use visualisations of audio in your mashups!

Come see us at our HMI and Accessibilty with BBC R& I talk, where we'll show you how to do synaesthesia with style!

Finding your way to a particular item in a recording of a radio programme can be difficult. Fast-forward and rewind functions aren't always very effective, especially in on-demand, on-line use. We are researching the presentation of audio recordings as visible timelines, with different colours or textures used to represent different characterics of the audio, like genre, speaker, tempo, key or rhythm - all extracted automatically





So, in this extract from Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 show, the music stands out in the middle. Jingles are seen before and after in a similar colour. Some of the song structure is also apparent.





We're bringing along a touchscreen that uses a spiral visualisaton to depict the last two hours of a radio service. The spiral is updated in real time, and the touch screen gives us a one-hour 'listen again' service.

At this web page you'll be able to generate your own jpg visualisatons for your mp3 files and use them in your mashups. You will also find a download link to get the visualisation data as a text file of RGB values (once we've added this functionality!)

To access this service: username:hackday password:hackday

If you'd like to know how these visualisations are generated or interesting directions we think this work could take, see our white paper Music Information Retrieval in Broadcasting:Some Visual Applications.

See also our Hack Moyles - Audio segmentation with RTMP page for other cool things you could do with audio.

For more information on the day, please talk to Alia Sheikh