MSN UK has just announced a new way to browse photos from Flickr and listen to music at the same time called Visualizer. The music collection from from the UK label Ninja Tune and the photos are matched up with the lyrics of the song. The screen is split into a grid and as the lyrics move through the song so each tile show the current lyric with the background of the grid being a photo from Flickr title with the current lyric.
The visualizer about page says this of the website:
VISUALIZER BY MSN PLAYS 47 SONGS AND SHOWS MILLIONS OF PICTURES. THE LYRICS WITH A TOTAL OF OVER 11’000 WORDS EXPLORE FLICKR AS TAGS FOR IMAGES, THE DYNAMIC SELECTION WITHIN THE SEARCH RESULTS HAPPENS RANDOMLY. EACH TIME A SONG IS BEING PLAYED, VISUALIZER BY MSN CREATES A COMPLETELY NEW AND UNIQUE VIDEO CLIP. ENJOY IT AND USE IT: WRITE YOUR OWN WORDS, PLAY IT WITH A RANDOM SONG AND SEND THE SOUNDING MESSAGE TO YOUR FRIENDS. IT’S GREAT, IT’S FUN, IT’S HIGHLY PERSONAL.
The site has been tailored for IE9 and I believe uses HTML5 to play the music and transition between the photos.
This is not only a fantastic way to view photos from Flickr but it’s equally a great visualizer for a music player. I like the way Zune shows a collection of album art and photos of the artist when playing music but I think that this might be an even better way of showing images when playing music. My only complaint is that when lyrics come in thick and fast the photos from Flickr cycle through far too quickly , it would be nice if it missed out some words and had a slightly longer transition between the photos.
This is well worth checking out and I hope to see Microsoft make further use of this in other products.












