On his New Yorker blog, Alex Ross posts some very neat musical data visualization: the average BPM of recordings of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, first movement, by recording year. I don’t see too much trending in there, but the distribution is interesting (red dots indicate that the repeat was taken, blue dots no repeat).

You can see a lot more at An Eroica Project. (Seriously, a lot, go check it out.)

(via Unquiet Thoughts)

Katie Paterson’s Earth-Moon-Earth is another phenomenal installation piece: For it, she converted Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and bounced the signal off the moon. Using the received signal back on Earth, she reconstructed the score, leaving the signals that weren’t bounced back out, and set the new score to play on a Disklavier in the gallery.

You can listen to the received Morse code and piano playback, or see the Morse code and score pre- and post-moon bounce.