What's the point of audio waveform visualization?
When playing audio, iPhone 14 displays the waveform on the dynamic island. It looks neat, but it got me thinking - why is this ever visualized outside of audio editing software? Is it just art? Does anyone actually get any information from it? What's the point?
To answer my own question, it does indicate that something is playing, even of the audio is turned off, which is useful.
I guess I'm wondering if anyone can "read" waveforms, or if there's some other usefulness to it.
It's not exactly art, but similar to a vumeter, you get an artifical "dancer" on your screen: just like watching other people dance (in rhythm), it activates your visual metronome and gets you more engaged with music.
If the above sounds convincing, bear in mind that I am just thinking aloud, and I have no idea if any of the above translates to other people, let alone that this might be the reason music is ever visualized like this for playback.
It can be art, but in most contexts it's a low information progress bar type "give the user something to watch" measure.
I do not know what is displaying on iphone, but I love seing a spectre (Fourier transform) on log scale while listening to music.