A Universal Workbench for Multimedia and Other Temporal Phenomena

Abstract

The world is full of complex temporal (time-based) phenomena, both natural and cultural: to name a few, animal movement, movies, football games, multimedia shows, weather, political crises, illnesses, wars, development of individuals, development of species, development of geographic features, and music. These things are always difficult to study or for performances of all kinds, whether artistic or athletic to create because they don't "sit still", so to speak. The usual ways to work seriously with anything temporal involve visualization. Visualizations on paper have been around for many centuries (consider music notation), and computer-based visualizations can be extremely helpful. But, to my knowledge, every visualization systems to date is limited to a specific domain. This is unfortunate because the synergy or leverage possible with a more general approach is enormous: two examples are generalized timelines and frequency-domain viewers. I am now designing a system for visualizing any temporal phenomenon, the General Temporal Workbench (GTW). The time is right for such a system, because of developments in infrastructure both general (e.g., the power of modern personal computers) and specific (e.g., recent advances in automatic synchronization). Initial work is focused on my own field, music, but I'll give examples from a wide range of disciplines.