Visualisation styles
I previously brought up the idea of a taxonomy for musical visualizations. Maybe taxonomy is not the right word, but I do feel that each of our endeavors at expressing music visually can be placed between two poles. These two poles are also present in visual art - there is that which is highly abstract - consisting of shapes and colors that do not refer to anything outside their own forms - and works that are much more suggestive, figurative, they refer to elements in the world around us.
With these two extremes there is another polarity - visualizations that are directly tied to a musical quality so that they are affected by a change in that quality, and those that are influenced “indirectly”, relying on the artist to create an effect in the visual in response to their perceptions of the music. I am not trying to make a claim right now that one is better than the other, although a direct tie between musical and visual expression would make the visual more of an information visualization. It would be based on something quantifiable.