SymPlot: A Web-Tool to Visualise Symbolic Musical Data

Some complex musical parameters might be especially difficult to understand for someone with no theoretical expertise in music. Musicians and music scholars alike normally evaluate such parameters visually by departing from scores, which present the musical events at once. Yet for the under-standing...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Munoz-Lago, Paula, Llorens, Ana, Parada-Cabaleiro, Emilia, Torrente, Alvaro
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
computational musicology
data science
Data visualization
digital humanities
Image color analysis
Iterative methods
Music
score
symbolic music data
Training
visualisation
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Summary:Some complex musical parameters might be especially difficult to understand for someone with no theoretical expertise in music. Musicians and music scholars alike normally evaluate such parameters visually by departing from scores, which present the musical events at once. Yet for the under-standing of such symbolic representations, musical training is essential, making scores mostly incomprehensible for amateurs. Data visualisation has been applied to meaningfully represent complex musical parameters, thus enabling music amateurs to grasp concepts such as texture or structure. Although scores are one of the "primary" sources to understand music, previous work shows a strong bias towards the visualisation of acoustic data, in detriment of the visualisation of symbolic information. To bridge the gap, we present SymPlot, a web-based open source tool to automatically visualise textural density, scoring, and structure from MusicXML files. Due to the multidisciplinary nature of the topic, in this project we have applied the Scrum's agile methodology, an iterative incremental approach specifically tailored for interdisciplinary projects. The tool, aimed at enhancing musical understanding in amateurs and students, as well as in scholars of other disciplines who need to incorporate music into their discourses, i.e., historians, philologists, etc., enables visualisation of local features at various hierarchical levels, highlighting similarities both within and across scores. Our evaluation of SymPlot-based on a five-level rating-scale test performed by 50 participants-suggests that colours increase users' understanding of complex musical parameters.
ISSN:2375-0138
DOI:10.1109/IV51561.2020.00092