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. Seventeen 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

Colour codes

• barcode—each moment's hue is its position on the circle of fifths, its saturation is the tonal focus, and its brightness is the loudness
• wave—the Freesound-style amplitude envelope, coloured by spectral centroid (dark blue = dark timbre, red = bright)

Structure

• ssm—a self-similarity matrix, so that musical form reads as texture
• trajectory—the piece as a smoothed path through its own timbre space (a PCA of the MFCC frames), coloured from start to end, so a piece that keeps returning to one sound draws a knot and a piece that travels draws a line
• keyscape—a Sapp-style triangle, with every window at every time scale coloured 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 draws a Poincaré portrait of successive inter-onset intervals, where metric playing collapses to points and rubato spreads into clouds. A beat-wheel inset adds the onset phases on the dominant-period circle and the pulse-clarity resultant arrow:

Stereo field

stereo shows where the music sits in the stereo image: a pan-by-frequency spectrogram (blue = left, red = right, ink strength = energy) with a goniometer inset, over a smoothed width-and-correlation timeline. Mono recordings degrade gracefully. For multichannel and ambisonic material, use ambiscape's spatial analysis.

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 colour families: a harmonically coherent album shares hues, a wandering one does not, and weakly tonal material (drones) washes out to low saturation.

Sonic thumbnails

Not everything worth summarising is visual. musiscape sonic <folder> renders a ~12-second audio summary per track: a montage of the most representative passage (the window whose features sit closest to the whole track), the climax, and the most contrasting energetic section, in chronological order with crossfades. Each album also gets one concatenated medley file for fast browsing by ear. Selection is deterministic and explainable; no learned model decides what matters.