Visualizing Music

I’m always interested in the ways that people visualize and represent music. As a field, we can often be very Western standard notation-based. I’m increasingly interested in digitally mediated ways of visualizing sound and music. I discuss some aspects of this in my chapter Inter/trans/cross/new media(ting): Navigating an emerging landscape of digital media for music education. If you are interested in the topic of music visualization, I also highly recommend Webb’s articles Music analysis down the (You) tube? Exploring the potential of cross-media listening for the music classroom and Re viewing listening: ‘Clip culture’ and cross-modal learning in the music classroom as well as Thibeault’s Learning from looking at sound: Using multimedia spectrograms to explore world music. Also consider taking a look at Kerchner’s writing on students performing listening maps.

Consider how students might observe existing visualizations and create their own as a way of engaging with and developing understanding of music. Also consider how creating music visualizations can be a form of analysis and develop students’ aural skills.

Here are some examples of music visualizations I use in the Art of Teaching Contemporary Musicians course that I teach at ASU:

Kinesthetic Listening Map (Performed Live) – Consider how you might expand on this idea beyond text.

A visual performance: Prélude n°1 aux tubes musicaux (boomwhackers)

Andrew Kuo’s visual map of aesthetic responses to Joanna Newsom’s “Kingfisher”
Audio of Kingfisher

A Music video for Sin Fang Bous’s clangour and flutes that has some interesting listening-map-like characteristics. Consider how students might create music videos that accentuate or draw upon aspects of the music (beyond literal matching of lyrics to image)

Video for “Freeze” T-Pain & Chris Brown

Music Animation Machine

A digital “score” of Dvorak’s Symphony 9

Text-based commentary on Haydn’s Opus 33 Quartet 1

Partitura-Ligeti audiovisual concert

Alexander Chen’s “baroque.me” visualization of the first Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suites (also available via video)

Alexander Chen’s visualization of Steve Reich’s Piano Phase

Bjork’s Biophilia Apps

Mike Hamad’s Setlist Schematics

See the related New York Times video “How to Draw a Phish Song”

Dr. Deborah Blair’s resources on listening maps for music education. (scroll over “more” in the navigation bar and you will find several links to the resources)