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Visualization of concurrent tones in music with colours

Published: 25 October 2010 Publication History

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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cover image ACM Conferences
MM '10: Proceedings of the 18th ACM international conference on Multimedia
October 2010
1836 pages
ISBN:9781605589336
DOI:10.1145/1873951
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. colour
  2. concurrent tones
  3. midi
  4. music visualization

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MM '10
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MM '10: ACM Multimedia Conference
October 25 - 29, 2010
Firenze, Italy

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Overall Acceptance Rate 2,145 of 8,556 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)A Way for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People to Enjoy Music by Exploring and Customizing Cross-modal Music ConceptsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642665(1-17)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Hearing with the eyes: modulating lyrics typography for music visualizationThe Visual Computer10.1007/s00371-023-03239-540:11(8345-8361)Online publication date: 19-Jan-2024
  • (2023)Augmented-Reality Presentation of Household Sounds for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing PeopleSensors10.3390/s2317761623:17(7616)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2023
  • (2023)Deep Learning-based Visualization of Music Mood2023 International Conference on Cyberworlds (CW)10.1109/CW58918.2023.00015(32-39)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2023
  • (2022)VoxLens: Making Online Data Visualizations Accessible with an Interactive JavaScript Plug-InProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517431(1-19)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Towards Sound Accessibility in Virtual RealityProceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Multimodal Interaction10.1145/3462244.3479946(80-91)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021
  • (2021)A Survey of Music Visualization TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/346183554:7(1-29)Online publication date: 18-Jul-2021
  • (2021)Liquid Hands: Evoking Emotional States via Augmented Reality Music VisualizationsProceedings of the 2021 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences10.1145/3452918.3465496(305-310)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2021
  • (2021)Towards Inclusive Streaming: Building Multimodal Music Experiences for the Deaf and Hard of HearingExtended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411763.3451690(1-7)Online publication date: 8-May-2021
  • (2021)Music Emotion Visualization through Colour2021 International Conference on Electronics, Information, and Communication (ICEIC)10.1109/ICEIC51217.2021.9369788(1-6)Online publication date: 31-Jan-2021
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