Visualization and Music Harmony: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Music expertise is the ability to understand the structural elements of music compositions by reading musical scores or simply listening to music performance. Although the most common way to learn music is through the study of musical scores, this approach is demanding in terms of learning ability, given the required implicit knowledge of music theoretical concepts. Learning musical rules is hard, especially for classical music. To simplify this task, visualization is one of the most promising approaches, also thanks to the human visual cognition ability (i.e., visual memory, visual attention, and so on). This work aims at building a visual tool, named VisualHarmony, to help people in composing music pieces in a quick and efficient way (i.e., avoiding specific errors as dictated by classical music theory rules). More specifically, a visualization technique able to represent harmonic structures has been evaluated by teachers of Conservatory classes and from domain experts in order to collect requirements used to define graphical features needed to facilitate the study of the rules used in classical music, and to implement VisualHarmony. We have focused our attention on a specific type of music compositions, i.e., the chorale style (4-voice music). VisualHarmony was tested in order to analyze system usability and user satisfaction. Results of these studies provided us with positive feedback about the effectiveness of the idea, the pleasantness of the graphical choices, the satisfaction of the users with regard to the easiness and the usefulness of the provided tool.