Evaluation study of Visualisations for Harmonic Analysis of 4-part Music

In order to master the harmonic analysis of musical compositions, a musician needs to profoundly understand the music theory, have an extensive training, and put a considerable effort in the task. For learners it can be a time-consuming and tedious task due to the steep learning curve. The idea throughout this paper is to visually annotate musical compositions with the objective to support users in performing the harmonic analysis, in which the task is mainly based on the identification of similar tonalities and relevant degrees. The paper proposes two visualisations that use rectangles to represent tonalities and the degree and exploit colours to represent similarities. The design of visualisations is based on guidelines drawn from informal interviews with teachers of the "Conservatorio G. Martucci", a conservatory in Salerno, and from literature [1]. The evaluation study by involving 30 participants showed that overall the 30 participants of the evaluation study achieved better results performing the harmonic analysis using the musical composition enhanced with visualisations compared to the standard musical composition; it is a promising result that encourages further investigation in the field.