Host: The Institute of Image Information and Television Engineers
Variation is a form of classical music, which consists of a simple melody, called theme, followed by varied theme in terms of harmony and rhythm. For understanding variations, it is important to catch how the theme is varied while it is difficult even for people with musical experience to do it only from scores and/or sound sources. In this study, a new method was developed, which allows instrument players or music lovers to visually understand the structure of variations. The system takes a MIDI dataset of a variation as input, and visualizes its musical structure by placing corresponding geometric objects in a designated 3D space, where a set of visual mappings are devised to associate each of the known variation forms with the parameters of the rendered objects. The system also provides visual information seeking functions so that the users can comprehend the structure of the variation interactively. Two types of experiments have been carried out to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of mapping intuitiveness and variation comprehensibility.
