Visualization of concurrent tones in music with colours

Peter Ciuha and Bojan Klemenc and Franc Solina Visualization of concurrent tones in music with colours. In: ACM MM'10.

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Abstract

Visualizing music in a meaningful and intuitive way is a challenge. Our aim is to visualize music by interconnecting similar aspects in music and in visual perception. We focus on visualizing harmonic relationships between tones and colours. Related existing visualizations map tones or keys into a discrete set of colours. As concurrent (simultaneous) tones are not perceived as entirely separate, but also as a whole, we present a novel method for visualizing a group of concurrent tones (limited to the pitches of the 12-tone chromatic scale) with one colour for the whole group. The basis for calculation of colour is the assignment of key spanning circle of thirds to the colour wheel. The resulting colour is not limited to discrete set of colours: similar tones, chords and keys have similar colour hue; dissonance and consonance are represented by low and high colour saturation respectively. The proposed method is demonstrated as part of our prototype music visualization system using extended 3-dimensional piano roll notation.

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