To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually?
Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation.
Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.
By:
Eric Isaacson
Imprint: Indiana University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions:
Height: 254mm,
Width: 203mm,
ISBN: 9780253064738
ISBN 10: 0253064732
Pages: 424
Publication Date: 31 May 2023
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Preface Acknowledgments Accessing Audiovisual Materials Introduction Part 1: Preliminaries 1. Leveraging the Power of the Brain 2. The Role of Metaphor 3. Multivariate Images 4. Telling a Story 5. Facilitating Comparison 6. Information Layers 7. Information Integration 8. Making Every Part of an Image Count 9. Presenting Tabular Data 10. Small Multiples 11. Using Color 12. Additional General Principles 13. Case Study: Western Notation Part 2: Musical Spaces 14. Pitch Spaces 15. Collections, Scales, and Modes 16. The Circle of Fifths 17. The Tonnetz 18. Atonal Spaces 19. Symmetrical Pitch Structures 20. Tonal Hierarchy, Tendency, Progression 21. The Overtone Series Part 3: Musical Time 22. Basic Durations 23. Unmeasured Musical Time 24. Musically Measured Musical Time 25. Externally Measured Musical Time (Performance Timing) 26. Proportion Part 4: Pitch, Texture, Timbre, Form 27. Textual Representations of Pitch 28. Piano Roll Notation 29. Alternate Notational Systems 30. Tuning and Temperament 31. Microtuning 32. Timbre 33. Texture 34. Voice Leading 35. Schematic and Procedural Representations 36. Formal Models 37. Pitch-Class Set Tables 38. Instrument Ranges 39. Translations Part 5: Music Analysis 40. Lutosławksi's Jeux Venitiens 41. Annotating Musical Scores 42. Thematic Analysis 43. Contour Analysis 44. Tonal Plans 45. Symmetry in Music Analysis 46. Rhythmic Analysis 47. Formal Analysis 48. Hierarchy in Music 49. Serialism 50. Corpus Studies 51. Musical Chronologies, Influences, and Styles 52. Animation Part 6: Visualization in the Professional Realm 53. Conference Handouts 54. Presentation Slide Shows 55. Conference Posters 56. Print Publication 57. The Essential Visualization Toolbox Epilogue Bibliography Index
Eric Isaacson is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and is a faculty member in the Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University.
Reviews for Visualizing Music
"""Visualizing Music provides a rich visual overview of the discipline of music theory while offering practical suggestions for scholars.""—Timothy Koozin, Moores School of Music, University of Houston"
