Mapping the Future of Music

In fact, the word that came up over and over was a musical one: mash-up. It's fascinating to watch as decades of high-resolution mapping data becomes available through the Web for normal people to remix. One of the most impressive demos was the way Google is integrating its recently acquired 3D modeling application, SketchUp, with Google Maps. WIth a few twists and tweaks of the mouse, the demonstrator extruded a 3D box from a 2D map and then tiled a photograph onto it. Within minutes, he had a photorealistic model integrated into the formerly flat map.

Jaws dropped. We were 15 minutes into lunch, and no one left. If visualizing location data is this exciting, I thought, how could we improve music visualization? Traditional notation is like the sketchiest of 2D maps. 3D frequency plots and jukebox visualizers are closer, but too impressionistic to understand viscerally.

In another demo, animated paths traced their way along a flat surface, building a street map before our eyes. The data for the paths, it turned out, came from couriers with location transmitters. I started to wonder what it would look like to map the performance of a piece of music. As you navigate a song, your rate of "travel" changes slightly and so does your pitch (sometimes drastically when you hit the wrong notes). Could common performance mistakes be equivalent to traffic hazard areas?

When you think about it, a lot of art is about mapping — in the sense of transferring the concepts or characteristics of one thing onto another. Those juxtapositions, those mash-ups, create a tension that provokes the observer to resolve the symbols and derive meaning.