Visualizing the Semantic Structure in Classical Music Works

Abstract

A major obstacle in the appreciation of classical music is that extensive training is required to understand musical structure and compositional techniques toward comprehending the thoughts behind the musical work. In this paper, we propose an innovative visualization solution to reveal the semantic structure in classical orchestral works such that users can gain insights into musical structure and appreciate the beauty of music. We formulate the semantic structure into macrolevel layer interactions, microlevel theme variations, and macro-micro relationships between themes and layers to abstract the complicated construction of a musical composition. The visualization has been applied with success in understanding some classical music works as supported by highly promising user study results with the general audience and very positive feedback from music students and experts, demonstrating its effectiveness in conveying the sophistication and beauty of classical music to novice users with informative and intuitive displays.

A Survey of Colormaps in Visualization

“…These colormaps are intended for identifying the category of a stream, and are designed with aesthetics in mind. Chan et al [29] propose a visualization method for semantic structuring of a time series of the classical music score. To avoid false emotions invoked by misleading colors, they design a colormap based on colors of instruments to represent different groups of instruments in a layer braid visualization and the colormap is also interactive to allow customization.…”

“…Furthermore, many works, for example, [6], [8], [14], [37], [59], [69], require combined tasks to be performed with a single colormap. Also, aesthetics is an important goal for colormaps, and at least [26], [29] explicitly declare these as their goals.…”

“…For the 18 papers with originally designed colormaps, colormaps from [13], [101] are similar to the ColorBrewer colormaps, whereas [6], [47], [59], [69] utilize luminance increasing multihue colormaps, and [26], [29], [37], [54], [97] design multihue colormaps with the issues of standard rainbow colormap in mind.…”

“…Regardless, authors of these works are fully aware of the issues of rainbow colormaps and cite the rainbow colormap paper by Borland and Taylor [16]. Eleven papers ([1], [2], [8], [14], [29], [51], [63], [68], [98], [99], [110], [114]) allow users to edit colormaps to explore or highlight regions of interest in their data. Five papers ([6], [47], [51], [63], [68]) utilize colormaps specifically tailored to highlight small features in data.…”

“…The original volume rendering of a frog CT scan is shown to the left, whereas a harmonized version using [29] is shown to the right. Copyright IEEE.…”