Augmenting Music Sheets with Harmonic Fingerprints

Abstract

Figure 1: Augmenting piano sheet music with harmonic fingerprint glyphs facilitates the identification of recurring harmonic patterns and the comparison of musical parts to understand differences in the note distribution. Here, an excerpt from Chopin's 'Grande Valse Brillante' is augmented with the fingerprints showing a recurring pattern in the first four glyphs. ABSTRACTCommon Music Notation (CMN) is the well-established foundation for the written communication of musical information, such as rhythm or harmony. CMN suffers from the complexity of its visual encoding and the need for extensive training to acquire proficiency and legibility. While alternative notations using additional visual variables (e.g., color to improve pitch identification) have been proposed, the community does not readily accept notation systems that vary widely from the CMN. Therefore, to support student musicians in understanding harmonic relationships, instead of replacing the CMN, we present a visualization technique that augments digital sheet music with a harmonic fingerprint glyph. Our design exploits the circle of fifths, a fundamental concept in music theory, as visual metaphor. By attaching such glyphs to each bar of a composition we provide additional information about the salient harmonic features available in a musical piece. We conducted a user study to analyze the performance of experts and non-experts in an identification and comparison task of recurring patterns. The evaluation shows that the harmonic fingerprint supports these tasks without the need for close-reading, as when compared to a not-annotated music sheet.

Augmenting Sheet Music with Rhythmic Fingerprints

“…Information Visualization has proven effective for music analysis tasks, such as identifying similar patterns or highlighting relevant aspects [22]. In previous work, we demonstrate how augmenting sheet music with harmonic fingerprints helps to identify patterns [31]. The results of the accompanying study confirm that with the harmonic fingerprints, even novice users could uncover harmonic patterns that only music experts were able to see before.…”

“…The augmentation of CMN with abstract visualizations enables close and distant reading [20]. In previous work, we applied such a combination to aid harmony analysis with harmonic fingerprints [31] visually. Music Structure Analysis -A common music structure analysis task is to extract the temporal sections, often referred to by lettered labels (i.e., A, B,C, ...) [34].…”

Augmenting Digital Sheet Music through Visual Analytics

“…The technique description builds the foundation for possible analysis applications. We implemented the technique as an exemplary instance ( MusicVis ) by using existing abstract visualization designs that we published in our previous work [FMK*20, MBEA19]. Figure 1 illustrates the different analysis components of MusicVis .…”

A Visual Decision-Support System using Fingerprint Matrices applied to Cyclical Spatio-Temporal Data from Motorsports

“…Musical analysis also uses the FM design. Harmonic fingerprinting [30] displays rhythm and harmony information for viewers in the same way as text analysts use an FM. Prior research has also used the FM as the overview component in an overview+detail design for visualizing harmony and melody for individual instruments in a musical score [31].…”