Most audio players offer visualizations. Unfortunately most of them either are just plain boring or don't really visualize the music very well. KDE's amarok has one that is really excellent: jakdaw.

Jakdaw does a good job of both following and representing the intensity of the music. And it generates an amazing display of colors.

But even with a good visualization a lot of music is not all that interesting to watch. Over the last month or so I've occasionally been "looking" through my music collection. The visualizations are surprisingly varied for different artists. And though a lot of them are nice to watch, some artists consistently produce much more varied and artistic displays than others.

To some degree it is predictable, but not always. Quite often the visualization is a lot less interesting than you'd expect and especially some slower or quieter songs produce much more interesting displays than you'd expect.

A blanket of sound does not produce a very interesting display, but strong accents and mood changes do. As is often the case in art, the real challenge in composing music seems to be leaving things out and to have individual instruments play their own tune instead of having everything move together.

The two artists that really stand out so far are Björk and Faithless. Both consistently produce visualizations that are at times stunningly beautiful and also show a lot more detail in the music than others.

For Björk It's Oh So Quiet (from Post) and Violently Happy (from Debut) are very nice, but two songs that really stand out are Hunter (from Homogenic) and Hyper Balad (from Post). For Faithless songs like We Come 1 and Tarantula (from Outrospective), and Salva Mea and Insomnia (from Reverence) are truly worth watching.