SymPlot: A Web-Tool to Visualise Symbolic Musical Data

The Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Music, 2020

In E. Rocconi and T. Lynch, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Music (Wiley-Blackell, 2020) 17–30

This paper examines a range of methods of exploit- ing the inherent semantic qualities of graphical symbols, colour and visual communication. Moody’s Notations Theory is used as a starting point in the discussion of expanding the range of techniques for visualizing sound and instrumental notation. Recent findings in the understanding of semantic primes, visual language, perceptual met- aphors and “weak synaesthesia” are examined and connections to existing sound-based fields such as spectromorphology, action-based scores, graphical and animated notation. The potentials for the use of colour to represent timbre both for descriptive analytical and prescriptive compositional tool in electroacoustic music is explored. Works by Cathy Berbarian, Luciano Berio, Aaron Cassidy, Vinko Globokar, Juraj Kojs, Helmut Lachenmann, Ryan Ross Smith and the author are discussed.

—Musicologists, music cognition scientists and others have long studied music in all of its facets. During the last few decades, research in both score and audio technology has opened the doors for automated, or (in many cases) semi-automated analysis. There remains a big gap, however, between the field of audio (performance) and score-based systems. In this research, we propose a web-based Interactive system for Multi-modal Music Analysis (IMMA), that provides musicologists with an intuitive interface for a joint analysis of performance and score. As an initial use-case, we implemented a tension analysis module in the system. Tension is a semantic characteristic of music that directly shapes the music experience and thus forms a crucial topic for researchers in musicology and music cognition. The module includes methods for calculating tonal tension (from the score) and timbral tension (from the performance). An audio-to-score alignment algorithm based on dynamic time warping was implemented to automate the synchronization between the audio and score analysis. The resulting system was tested on three performances (violin, flute, and guitar) of Paganini's Caprice No. 24 and four piano performances of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. We statistically analyzed the results of tonal and timbral tension and found correlations between them. A clustering algorithm was implemented to find segments of music (both within and between performances) with similar shape in their tension curve. These similar segments are visualized in IMMA. By displaying selected audio and score characteristics together with musical score following in sync with the performance playback, IMMA offers a user-friendly intuitive interface to bridge the gap between audio and score analysis.

Proceedings of the SMC Conferences, 2013

Although a variety of interfaces for music retrieval have been proposed so far, they are not always valid for retrieving classical music, a piece of which is recorded by many players. The lineup that current music retrieval systems suggest for a given musical piece is likely to be in order of sales. This is not always desired by classical music lovers, who are interested in various interpretations of a piece. In this paper, PEVI, a novel interface based on a scape plot for finding interpretations of classical music, is presented. The scape plot window, which visualizes the most similar performances of a specified scope (multiple layers) in a specified piece by using color tags, is used as the key to assigning a range of musical pieces to be referred to. Similar performances are displayed, on a different window, as their coordinates represent the similarity of two selected musical features in regard to tempo, dynamics, and delicate control within a beat. Users of PEVI are able to observe the transition of the indices of similar performances by changing the scope on the scape plot and each weight of the musical features. In this paper, the effectiveness of PEVI is discussed with an analysis of difference performances of "Romance de Amor."

Proceedings of the XIX CIM Music Informatics Symposium (CIM 2012)

""State-of-the-art ways for visualizing high-level music concepts are currently a trend in music computing, aiming at bridging the semantic gap between music information retrieval and human knowledge. This work presents the analysis of Brahms’s String Quartet Op.51 No.1 concerning the concept of chromaticism by using the chromatic index (a chroma measure especially designed for calculating chromatic elements within a piece of music with useful diagnostic value) as a metric. The visualization of the chromatic analysis with actual colours exhibits chromatic variations to musicologists and can even be used as a digital signature for music. The suggested computational approach in MIDI and Audio Files reveals specific motives of the quartet that provide interesting chromatic phenomena. A comparative study between the results of analysis on score-based data and the performance data (from an indifferent live performance) brings the diversity of chromatic perception the same music can cause to light. Moreover, Allen Forte’s proposed motives in his study of Brahms’s Op.51 No.1 are examined for chromatic elements. Each one of the four voices is separately analyzed so that its specific role in the piece’s progression will become evident. Additive techniques are used to calculate the overall chromatic indices of the quartet.""

2005

A typical experiment design within the field of music psychology is playing music to a test subject who listens and reacts -most often by verbal means. One limitation of this kind of test is the inherent difficulty of measuring an emotional reaction in a laboratory setting. This paper describes the design, functions and possible uses of the software tool REMUPP (Relations between musical parameters and perceived properties), designed for investigating various aspects of musical experience. REMUPP allows for non-verbal examination of selected musical parameters (such as tonality, tempo, timbre, articulation, volume, register etc.) in a musical context. The musical control is put into the hands of the subject, introducing an element of creativity and enhancing the sense of immersion. Information acquired with REMUPP can be output as numerical data for statistical analysis, but the tool is also suited for the use with more qualitatively oriented methods.

This paper presents a music visualization tool that shows the tonal progression in, and tonal distribution of, a piece of music on Lerdahl's two-dimensional tonal pitch space. The method segments a piece into uniform time slices, and determines the most likely key in each slice. It then generates the visualization by dynamically showing the sequence of keys as translucent, growing discs on the twodimensional plane. The frequency of a key is indicated by the size of its colored disc. Each color and position corresponds to a key, and related keys are shown in proximity with related colors. The visual result effectively presents the changing distribution of the keys employed. The proposed visualization is an improvement over more basic charting methods, such as histograms, and it maintains standards of information design in the form of added dimensionality, color, and animation. We show that the visualization is invariant under music transformations that preserve the piece's identity. We conclude by illustrating how this method may be used to visually distinguish between tonal progression and distribution patterns in western classical versus Armenian folk music.

Computer Graphics Forum

Manually investigating sheet music collections is challenging for music analysts due to the magnitude and complexity of underlying features, structures, and contextual information. However, applying sophisticated algorithmic methods would require advanced technical expertise that analysts do not necessarily have. Bridging this gap, we contribute CorpusVis, an interactive visual workspace, enabling scalable and multi‐faceted analysis. Our proposed visual analytics dashboard provides access to computational methods, generating varying perspectives on the same data. The proposed application uses metadata including composers, type, epoch, and low‐level features, such as pitch, melody, and rhythm. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a pair‐analytics study with nine participants. The qualitative results show that CorpusVis supports users in performing exploratory and confirmatory analysis, leading them to new insights and findings. In addition, based on three exemplary workflows, we de...

Isochords is a visualization of music that aids in the classification of musical structure. The Isochords visualization highlights the consonant intervals between notes and common chords in music. It conveys information about interval quality, chord quality, and the chord progression synchronously during playback of digital music. Isochords offers listeners a means to grasp the underlying structure of music that, without extensive training, would otherwise remain unobserved or unnoticed. In this paper we present the theory of the Isochords structure, the visualization, and comments from novice and experienced users.

musik.uos.de

Background in musicology. The internal structure of musical works and relations to its context belong to the major subjects of musicological efforts, be they paper based or computer aided. Currently, musical structures are described by musicologists mostly in an ad hoc ...