Visual Analysis for the Compositional Process of Composers in Spectral School

Abstract

We propose a visual analysis approach for exploring the compositional process of composers in the Spectral School, with a particular focus on its sub-processes of sound analysis and synthesis. Spectral music has been one of the significant trends in contemporary music since the 1970s. Composers in the Spectral School use the acoustic properties of sounds as the basis of their compositional materials. One of the representative software systems they use is AudioSculpt, developed by IRCAM. We develop an accompanying system with AudioSculpt to manage the history of creating sounds with spectral analysis of sound materials. The salient feature of our system lies in its tessellated spectrogram space whose axes represent the elapsed time of the sound and the progress of composition. On the pixel-oriented, spatial substrate, the system makes it possible for users to analyze the compositional processes by using dedicated interactive manipulations. The present system can also be regarded as an initial attempt at managing the provenance of time-series events in the music visualization field. Our approach is intended to pave the way for composers and musicologists to analyze, develop, and share the compositional methodologies.