Moodbar is a computer
visualization
Visualization or visualisation may refer to:
*Visualization (graphics), the physical or imagining creation of images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message
* Data visualization, the graphic representation of data
* Information visualiz ...
used for navigating within a piece of music or any other recording on a digital audio track. This is done with a commonly horizontal bar that is divided into vertical stripes. Each stripe has a colour combination showing the "mood" within a short part of the audio track. The colour can depend on spectrum and/or rhythmic features of the part of the track. If the audio is a song then various parts of it (intro, choruses, solos, accents etc.) as well as changes (
dynamics,
rhythm
Rhythm (from Greek , ''rhythmos'', "any regular recurring motion, symmetry") generally means a " movement marked by the regulated succession of strong and weak elements, or of opposite or different conditions". This general meaning of regular recu ...
,
texture
Texture may refer to:
Science and technology
* Surface texture, the texture means smoothness, roughness, or bumpiness of the surface of an object
* Texture (roads), road surface characteristics with waves shorter than road roughness
* Texture ...
, playing instruments) are differently coloured on the bar. If the audio is a speech or an interview then the moodbar displays different speaking segments in unique colour combinations.
Moodbar was originally presented by
Gavin Wood
Gavin James Wood (born 1980) is an English computer scientist, a founder of Ethereum and creator of Polkadot and Kusama.
Early life
Wood was born in Lancaster, England, United Kingdom. He attended the Lancaster Royal Grammar School. He gradua ...
and Simon O’Keefe in their paper ''On Techniques for Content-Based Visual Annotation to Aid Intra-Track Music Navigation''.
Moodbar has been implemented for
Amarok,
Clementine
A clementine (''Citrus × clementina'') is a tangor, a citrus fruit hybrid between a willowleaf mandarin orange ( ''C.'' × ''deliciosa'') and a sweet orange (''C. × sinensis''), named in honor of Clément Rodier, a French missionary who fir ...
Strawberry Music Player and
Exaile
Exaile is a cross-platform free and open-source audio player, tag editor and library organizer. It was originally conceived to be similar in style and functions to KDE's Amarok 1.4, but uses the GTK widget toolkit rather than Qt. It is writte ...
music players and the GJay smart playlist creator for Linux.
As of 2008, the default implementation of Amarok's moodbar only uses the spectral content of the current section of the track. It calculates the energy in the low, medium, and high frequency bands, and turns this into the amount of red, green, and blue in the corresponding stripe. Each moodbar file is 1000 samples long, which corresponds to roughly 4-5 samples every second for a typical 3-4 minute long song. This is not useful for telling anything about the rhythm of a song, but it is sometimes possible to guess where different instruments are playing. This can be useful for spotting verse, chorus, verse structure, and breaks in the music.
See also
*
Music Genome Project
The Music Genome Project is an effort to "capture the essence of music at the most fundamental level" using various attributes to describe songs and mathematics to connect them together into an interactive map. The Music Genome Project covers five ...
*
Acoustic fingerprint
An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, a fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database.
Practical uses of aco ...
References
External links
The Moodbar page in the Amarok User Manual
{{Comp-sci-stub
User interface techniques
Data visualization software
Music visualization software