Visualizing Harmony
using Chordal Glyphs
and Color Mapping

Music Encoding Conference (MEC) 2021

Presented July 20th, 2021, as a poster at the MEC'21 Music Encoding Conference.


Lind, J. Visualizing Harmony Using Chordal Glyphs and Color Mapping. In Münnich, S.; and Rizo, D., editor(s), Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021, pages 151–158, 2022. Humanities Commons

Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.17613/taak-jv92

Poster

MEC21_Poster_Lind_Visualizing Harmony using Chordal Glyphs and Color Mapping.pdf

Abstract

Musical scores are frequently annotated with harmonic information, but widely used text-based methods rely on a limited number of visual channels. Though glyph-based methods exploit more channels, existing systems often violate perceptual design principles when employing color and rarely capture the frequency of chordal changes or their harmonic function. In this work, we introduce a new design idiom for augmenting sheet music through chordal glyphs embedded directly within musical staves. Harmonic concepts, weighted by saliency and categorized by data type, are mapped to visual channels ranked by discriminability. Preattentive processing is leveraged to support various user tasks, alongside redundant encodings of foundational harmonic elements to improve overall perceptual effectiveness. Key names and chord roots are displayed using parallel hue-based 12-step categorical colormaps. We then distill several design implications inherent in assigning colors to musical pitches regarding perceptual and linguistic effectiveness. Following this discussion, we outline open research directions.

Paper

Lind_Visualizing Harmony_mec2021_proceedings.pdf