Concepts and Representations of Musical Hierarchies (original) (raw)

How can music visualisation techniques reveal different perspectives on musical structure

2017

Standard western notation supports the understanding and performance of music, but has limited provisions for revealing overall musical characteristics and structure. This paper presents several visualisers for highlighting and providing insights into musical structures, including rhythm, pitch, and interval transitions, also noting how these elements modulate over time. The visualisations are presented in the context of Shneiderman’s Visual Information-Seeking Mantra, and terminology from the Cognitive Dimensions of Music Notations usability framework. Such techniques are designed to make understanding musical structure quicker, easier, less error prone, and take better advantage of the intrinsic pattern recognition abilities of humans.

The Internal Representation of Pitch Sequences in Tonal Music

1981

A model for the internal representation of pitch sequences in tonal music is advanced. This model assumes that pitch sequences are retained as hierarchical networks. At each level of the hierarchy, elements are organized as structural units in accordance with laws of figural goodness, such as proximity and good continuation. Further, elements that are present at each hierarchical level are elaborated by further elements so as to form structural units at the next-lower level, until the lowest level is reached. Processing advantages of the system are discussed.

Visualization of musical structure with maps

Proceedings of the Conference on …, 2004

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 manner, either textually or by tree diagrams, while existing music visualizations by software are either quite simple or very specific. Musical information is often of complex structure and could be handled better by adequate software tools.

Isochords: Visualizing Structure in Music

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.

NOTATIONAL SEMANTICS IN MUSIC VISUALIZATION AND NOTATION

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.

Music surface and musical structure: The role of abstraction in musical processing

Future Directions of Music Cognition, 2021

Because of its temporal nature, music presents a unique challenge to the perceptual systems. To understand music one must infer underlying musical structure based on a musical surface that is constantly changing. Accordingly, a central component of musical behavior involves the abstraction of underlying musical structure from the musical surface. The following paper discusses the central importance of such abstraction, looking at examples of the role of abstraction based on a variety of underlying representational structures (tonal hierarchies, tonal-metric hierarchies, melodic patterns). These examples support the idea that musical understanding is fundamentally driven by the apprehension of structural patterns, and not by auditory surface information.

Visualizing Music: Tonal Progressions and Distributions

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.

Perceiving Hierarchical Musical Structure in Auditory and Visual Modalities

2016

When listening to music, humans perceive underlying temporal regularities. The most perceptually salient of these is the beat, what listeners would tap or clap to when engaging with music, and what listeners use to anchor the events in the musical surface to a temporal framework. However, we do not know if people perceive those beats in hierarchically ordered relationships, with some beats heard as stronger and others as weaker, as proposed by musical theory. These hierarchical relationships would theoretically be advantageous in orienting attention to particular locations in musical time, and facilitate synchronizing musical behavior such as performing or dancing. In two experiments, I investigated if listeners perceive multiple levels of beats structured hierarchically, and if they use that information to decide if metricallystructured metronomes match or mismatch music. In Experiment 1, musicians and nonmusicians alike gave higher ratings of fit to metronomes that matched musical excerpts at two levels of a hierarchy over those that matched at only one or no levels. In Experiment 2, I had musicians and non-musicians rate the fit of auditory and visual metronomes to music, and administered tests of intelligence and musical aptitude to determine if these factors impacted metrical perception. Musicians and non-musicians rated visual metronomes similarly to auditory metronomes, once again giving highest ratings of fit to fully-metrically-matching metronomes over those that matched at one or no levels. Musical aptitude and intelligence did not relate to meter perception in any systematic way. With musicians and non-musicians alike able to match metronomes to music on two metrical levels, this suggests that perceiving a hierarchical structure of beats may be a natural way in which listeners organize their perception of time and make sense of the musical events they hear.