The invention provides apparatus and a method for creating a visual
representation of music that conveys the musical form, structure, event
surface, orchestration, and sonic framework of the piece being
visualized. The representation comprises visual characters/sprites that
move in time according to instructions from the metadata synchronized to
the actual musical recording. These characters accurately portray the
rhythm, pitch, and timbre of the individual elements in the musical
surface (individual lines or performers) and have a hierarchy of
representation, e.g. thematic elements that are divided into sub-elements
(gestures or phrases) that are further divided into individual notes. The
visual representation corresponds to the structure of the music as heard,
where simultaneous harmonic events are parsed into individual notes which
are then tied together into a rhythmic stream of linked events. Two
streams of data (the "musical" and the "sonic") are synchronized to the
musical piece to drive the visualization.