Earlier this week I stumbled upon the new Radiohead music video for their song “House of Cards,” which I had been eagerly anticipating since they first posted screen shots from it on their site. The excitement came from the fact that the video was not shot with camera, but by using lasers to capture then render 3D data. (A making-of video and a 3D data visualizer can be found on Google Code.)
I showed Ben the video the next time I saw him. We were both quite struck and we had a twenty minute discussion critiquing and praising the video. Ben had only heard the song once before but called Radiohead “a good ensemble” after listening to and enjoying both In Rainbows and Kid A.
This video comes at an interesting point in our project. I had just talked with Andy Stefik, the guy responsible for translating the score of the 10th Quartet into a pitch correct audio realization for the Kepler Quartet to use as a reference in preparation for the recording. This process involves translating the symbols of the score into raw data, to be interpreted by a computer program. In this case, it was a program that Andy authored, for the purpose of creating audio. But that data doesn’t have to be interpreted as audio. Next step: data visualization.