Watch: Google Whiz Visualizes the Beach Boys? Heavenly Harmonies

Paul McCartney says it brings him to tears. Tom Petty compares it to Beethoven. Bob Dylan, summing up the superhuman talents that allowed Brian Wilson to make Pet Sounds, probably said it best: ?Jesus, that ear. He should donate it to The Smithsonian.?

It?s true. In the mid-60?s, the Beach Boys? bandleader Brian Wilson had the best, most brilliant ear in pop music. Nowhere is that more evident than Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys? shimmering, heartbreaking, put-it-in-a-time-capsule-and-send-it-to-space masterpiece. No matter how many times you listen to it, there?s always something new to hear. But that?s the funny thing about Brian Wilson?s peerless ear: it?s peerless. As Mike Love, the group?s least enlightened member, groused during a characteristically nitpicky Pet Sounds recording session: ?Who?s gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?? Foolish, but you can see his point: Wilson was operating on a whole different sonic plane than the rest of us. Thankfully, Google designer Alexander Chen has given us a new way of appreciating Wilson?s genius. He?s visualized it.

The video shows you things you might not even realize you were hearing.

Chen, a Creative Director at Google Creative Lab in New York, says the idea came from church bells. Just like the size of a bell corresponds to the pitch of the note it produces, Chen figured he could use a series of circles to represent the notes of some other piece of music. He remembered reading that the Beach Boys? ?You Still Believe in Me? was inspired by a church choir, so it seemed like a perfect fit for the experiment. He found a recording that isolated the track?s vocals, meticulously transcribed the harmonies note for note, and then wrote some code in Processing to render it as it played.

The result is stunning?a different type of visualization than anything we?ve seen before. Instead of the trippy, move-with-the-beat type stuff you zoned to in your Winamp days, this is something far more rigorous. It shows you what you?re hearing, and just what you?re hearing, note for note. And in this case, especially towards the end of the song when the coda of soaring, multilayered harmonies kicks in, it shows you things you might not even realize you were hearing?all those discrete brotherly voices that melt together in a casual, ears-only listen.

Chen, a musician himself, has worked on all sorts of fascinating projects centered around music, interaction, and visualization. In 2011, he was responsible for the Les Paul Google Doodle, a playable version of the company?s logo that proved so popular Google kept it live for an extra 24 hours (a Google Doodle first). Recently, Chen?s been busy on projects related to Google Glass (for another recent experiment, he used Glass to film himself improvising a short, looped piece on viola?a different sort of music visualization.) But this latest piece is, I think, especially exciting. It?s fresh, new territory. And it makes us consider how, even in an infographic-obsessed media culture, the power of pure data viz as it relates to music has largely gone unexplored.

For Chen, though, that connection was there from a young age. ?I grew up playing viola in my school orchestra,? he explains. ?I remember the amazing feeling of sitting among a sea of bows moving in sync with the music. I imagine that before people had the ability to physically recorded music, they had to go to performances to hear it, so it was a given that music was inherently visual.? Someone attending a symphony back in the day was still confronted with a wall of sound, but at least they?d be able to see the individual bricks.

Now, Chen says, we take that visual element for granted. Perhaps reintroducing it in some form could make us appreciate music all the more? ?I wonder if visualizing the layers of music helps teach our ears to be able to pick apart those individual pieces?to literally get a little better at listening,? Chen asks. Maybe. But still not as good as Brian Wilson.

Source: http://www.wired.com/design/2013/07/a-google-whiz-visualizes-the-beach-boys-heavenly-harmonies/

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