Visual thumbnails & posters

Every track becomes one card: a main representation, a title bar (track, album, duration, key · bpm when a features.json exists), and a waveform strip. Sixteen styles, chosen with --style; albums additionally get contact sheets. All examples below are rendered from a small synthetic demo collection (arpeggios, drones, strummed chords).

musiscape thumbnails <folder> --style combo

Spectrogram family

mel (default) — timbre and texture; chroma — harmony over time; tempo — rhythmic periodicity; combo — all three stacked:

Color codes

barcode — each moment's hue is its position on the circle of fifths, saturation its tonal focus, brightness its loudness:

wave — Freesound-style: the amplitude envelope colored by spectral centroid (dark blue = dark timbre, red = bright):

Structure

ssm — self-similarity matrix: musical form as texture. keyscape — Sapp-style triangle: every window at every time scale colored by its key (hue = tonic on the fifths circle, light = major, dark = minor). arcs — Shape-of-Song repetition arcs:

Circular forms

vinyl — the track as a tonality disc (one revolution, harmony as hue, loudness as radius) with the Freesound waveform underneath. spiral — time-integrated energy on the Shepard helix (angle = pitch class, radius = octave — the only view that shows register). tonnetz — the harmony's path on the circle-of-fifths plane:

Rhythm

rhythm — a Poincaré portrait of successive inter-onset intervals (metric playing collapses to points, rubato spreads into clouds), with a beat-wheel inset: onset phases on the dominant-period circle and the pulse-clarity resultant arrow:

Schaeffer cards

See Schaeffer cards for the schaeffer (TARTYP) and tarsom styles.

Posters

musiscape poster <folder>                 # stacked harmony barcodes
musiscape poster <folder> --style vinyl   # grid of tonality discs

Albums read as color families: a harmonically coherent album shares hues, a wandering one doesn't, and weakly tonal material (drones) washes out to low saturation.