Personally, I love the "Music Animation Machine" visualizations, especially of Bach. Toccata and Fugue [this video] "Little" Fugue [link] Also enjoyable: Debussy's Clair de lune [link]
For those who are not up to reading music at Bach's level, Stephen Malinowski's Musical Animation videos are eye-opening, e.g., from the Musical Offering mentioned in the article: [link] Toccata and Fugue in Dmin: [this video] I was directed to Malinowski's work by Edward Tufte (you may be able to figure out why) and feel I should pass it on.
I have never been able to follow a score despite music lessons and playing in an orchestra (I faked it). I find such a striking difference between notation that just swims in front of my eyes: [link] And a bar graph which I can hear when muted: [this video] I have a similar issue with algebraic notation, the signifier and signified never connects. So much misery spending hours with a mass of punctuated greek in a cs paper to discover it describes a triangle. The decryption is not even sticky, I look away for a second and it immediately re-encrypts back to soup. I don't understand why since programming languages having always felt natural and something I learned as a pre-teen just by being left alone with a BBC micro and a "type in a game" book.
Bar-graph visualization easier to follow than notation.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
4 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more