From the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), comes this interesting visualization related to the Joyce Hatto controversy. The horizontal axis is time, and the areas of color represent the resemblance between two recordings in terms of musical timing. The image above is for Arthur Rubinstein’s 1939 recording of Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 68 No. 3. I guess they compare each recording to a corpus of other recordings: that big orange patch means that the timing is similar to his 1966 recording (I guess only the researchers get the color-coding information). Black is not a color, but represents uniqueness from the other recordings.

Compare that to this:

The little flecks at the bottom are statistical noise, but that huge amount of one color? That means the recording is almost entirely the same as another. If you didn’t read the Joyce Hatto controversy link above, basically there was an issue where her husband released CDs under her name that were apparently just recordings of other people. I’m finding conflicting information on whether they were digitally sped up or slowed down, but according to CHARM, these “timescapes” show sameness regardless of global speed. Given the weird tone of their article (apparently wanting to share these visualizations without making any accusations about Hatto—although her husband has confessed), I imagine their comment about this working “regardless of global tempo” is a nod to that claim of speed manipulation.

Hooray confusing stuff.

(via FlowingData)