Sound And Vision

I can't remember exactly when I first saw the tag "Visualizer" appended to a YouTube video but it feels like it must have been a few years ago, now. It was definitely well before I started noticing the equally sinister attribution "Distrokid" or the disturbing "CDBaby". Once I'd become aware of them, though, I couldn't stop seeing them everywhere.

It took a while but eventually I cracked and googled Distrokid. It was obviously some kind of distribution network but as to its provenance or authority I had nothing. Turns out it's about as unsinister as a faceless corporation can be. In case anyone else hasn't been able to find the ten seconds necesary to crack the code, Distrokid is "the easiest way for musicians to get music into Spotify, Apple, Amazon, Tidal, TikTok, YouTube, and more." Their words, obviously. 

It's not free but it's cheap at $19.99 a year for unlimited digital distribution to all those platforms, per artist. CDBaby's deal is based on per-item pricing. If I had something to sell I'm sure I'd end up using one or the other.

I don't, though, so that's about as far as I'm going with that story. Curiosity satisfied. Job done. 

And for a while, I thought I had the whole visualizer thing pegged, too. It was just some cheap-looking automated animation process that jiggles the screen or generates waveforms in response to an audio signal. It was clearly being used by people without either the time or the resources to make a proper video, although given you can make one on a phone in about the same time it takes to play the damn song, it's hard to imagine who those people might be.

If I'm not misremembering, there used to be something like it, built into whatever audio software we all used back in the 90s. I seem to recall you could have your monitor throw graphic shapes every time you played a soundfile or a CD. It was fun for five minutes but the novelty wore off fast.

The problem with that analysis was the increasing sophistication of the videos flying the "Visualizer" flag. When I first noticed them they were extremely basic - infinity tunnels, shimmering starfields, wobbling text, that kind of thing. Nothing you'd ever actually sit and watch, just some movement to make you feel you weren't stuck with a static image, something which I have to admit does make me move on to another "video" pretty damn fast when I'm surfing YouTube.

As time went on, the imagery started to become more nuanced. There were occasions where I did indeed watch a visualizer as though it had genuine content. Even so, I can't remember seeing one that made me think "Hang on, how is this not an actual video that someone's scripted, performed, directed and edited?" And then this morning I watched this:

That's Cuchillos by the excellent Lisasinson. It's also what I'd call "a video" but their record company, Elefant Records, don't agree. They've officially tagged it as a "Visualizer".

That does seem to blur the boundaries somewhat. I'd have been willing to bet that all the imagery in the video (Which is what I'm going to call it.) had been shot specifically for the occasion. It's a bet I'd lose, as will soon be revealed...

The lyrics are in Spanish, a language in which I can pick my way through a newspaper but don't speak nearly well enough to understand what they're singing. Fortunately, Elefant have thoughtfully provided a full transcript, which I ran through Google Translate, allowing me to affirm that, yes, the imagery in the video is specific to the import of the song. I mean, the bloody title of the thing in English  is "Knives" and the chorus runs

I do not want to hurt you
My knives are not for you

It's not even until halfway through that video the imagery even begins to repeat. It wasn't until I'd seen the whole thing and formed my interpretation that I found out much of it is recycled from another visualizer the band released about three months ago, for their last single Últimamente. That one looks even more like a fully-scripted video, though. Far from undermining my argument, I think it reinforces it.

I was really at loss to understand why either had the Visualizer tag at all, so finally I broke down and googled the whole concept.

Plenty of people seemed keen to explain it to me, although since the British-English spelling of the word (Visualiser) refers to a specific piece of office equipment, not all of them were helpful. Once I'd got my esses and zees sorted out, I found this from 2017, when the phenomenon appeared to be relatively new.

As Aliya Chaudry from 34th Street magazine puts it:

"A visualizer seems to be a simplistic visual intended to accompany a song, much like a music video or lyric video, and it’s a new trend. They tend to be less developed and fully–fledged than music videos, which often have more complicated visuals or a plot and characters. This term could come from music visualizers, software which produce graphics in response to audio, like Windows Media Player. This means that by calling their video clips “visualizers,” artists are arguing that this is the visual representation of their audio pieces."

So, pretty much what I always thought. Aliya also seems to be pushing the alternative term "Visualette". Thankfully, that never caught on, although a quick google search does show a lingering, residual usage. The article also makes the valid point that visualizers are often released as placeholder videos before a full video is available, something I've often seen. 

Less prescient is the idea that visualizers might replace lyric videos or the speculation that they "could just be another weird new trend in music." Five years on, I think we can safely say lyric videos aren't going anywhere and visualizers are here to stay.

Having confirmed the definition, I began to wonder about the source. I'm sure a band like Lisasinson, signed to a large indie label like Elefant, have all the resources they need to make videos or visualizers but what about the rest of us? Is there somewhere you can bang one of these things out at home, for free?

Yes, of course there is. More than one. Here's a list of the top eight. (Weird cut-off point. Who compiled that list? A spider?) I didn't see that one until after I'd done a basic Google search of my own. The top results in that were Veed and Renderforest. I picked the latter purely because of more mellifluous name.

Since I don't - for reasons that would take far too long to go into now - have any original music of my own available to upload, I grabbed a copyright-free MP3 from Pixabay. I combined that with a screenshot from my vast horde and slapped them together. To avoid stretching both Renderforest's freebie size limits and the patience of anyone foolish enough to watch the thing, I cut a short segment out of the audiofile using Audacity, limiting the whole thing to a tidy sixteen seconds or so.

Including the time it took me to find all the component parts, work out how to use Renderforest, remember how to use Audacity, run through the four-stage process and complete the project, it took me no more than twenty minutes to make two test samples. 

They may not be much (Okay, there's no "may" about it.) but as proof of concept they do what they need to. If I had to knock another of these out, say for an actual song, I reckon I could do it faster than I can drink a cup of coffee. Give me a couple of hours, I could probably make one I wouldn't be ashamed to have other people see.

As with most of these technological possibilities, chances are I'll never get around to using it for anything much, although I do have a few ideas.... As for writing about it, I realize I'm a good five years past the time anyone cared. Still, you never know when new knowledge is going to come in useful. 

I mean, I use that AI photo editing site Tipa put me on to a while back pretty much ever day. And does anyone even notice?