Music Visualisation: Key Concepts

Online score playback programs suffer from a couple of major yet entirely avoidable drawbacks.

Not being data-driven, the notation is (apart from some 'playback' and selection hacks) largely static: information-impoverished, accommodating no transformations, the notes in themselves no more than inert images.

Potential Crowdfunder? First Name Email Address

As a result, no data can be extracted directly from the notation, and nothing truly meaningful done with it. No integrated instrument models, no theory tools. No deep synergies with other disciplines such as art, storytelling or psychophysics.

There are of course modest exceptions. Data culled at a lower level and laboriously held in synch with displayed playback positions can be used to drive a lonely 'standard' instrument finger- or keyboard, such as guitar or piano. In essence, however, these are, and remain, hacks.

This is a vast, greenfield area inviting a paradigm change - to visual exploration. This has the power to unlock a wellspring of 'tacit knowledge' - "knowledge that cannot be put into words". Musicians hear songs when they read music, non-musicians seek visual patterns.

The world music aggregator and interworking platform in focus here overcomes all the above, radically and cleanly. Underlying it: a few simple concepts. Here a short, visual survey.

Big, brave, open-source, non-profit, community-provisioned, cross-cultural and pine tar crazy. → Like, share, back-link, pin, tweet and mail. Hashtags? For the crowdfunding: #VisualFutureOfMusic. For the future live platform: #WorldMusicInstrumentsAndTheory. Or simply register as a potential crowdfunder..

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Music Visualisation: Key Concepts

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Music + Data Viz = Music Viz Score- & Data-Driven, Structured, Personal

Unlock Core Structures Economy, Sufficiency, Elegance

Online Modelling Gaps Bring Missing Instruments & Tools Online

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The western, or classical, 12-tone equal temperament system is just one of many in use worldwide. Curious? You are far from alone.

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Radical Reuse Generic to Specific Modelling

Model Almost Any Instrument Heritage to Experimental

To Those First Instrument Models But With Total Configuration Control

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Much non-Western music is microtonal: classical music from India, Turkey, Arabia and Persia, gamelan music from Indonesia, xylophone music from Africa, Byzantine liturgical music, folk music from Middle- and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus.

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Instrumental Building Blocks Form, Function, Physics

Non-Profit: Social Value Wellspring Rote Reinvestment, No Wealth Hoarding

Integration & Control Change One → Change All

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We are heirs to a solid folk, traditional and world music foundation, comprising hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dances, work, protest, celebratory and travel songs, along with a vast repository of ritual and other community music.

My feeling is that the revenue optimisation that resulting from speculation would put at risk many of the performance and usage freedoms associated with these works - if not in the long term their existence. It seems essential that this reservoir and any derivatives be protected, and remain free to be developed. To this end: open source, community and enthusiast driven.

It is my hope that development of the instrument models and theory tools for this aggregator platform will be financed through crowd funding initiatives organised directly by the affected music communities. How?

World Music Visualisation Platform: Generating Social Value.

Building on a foundation of open web standards, crowdfunding fuels the development of instrument models and theory tools in an open source (liberal code reuse) context.

Content (the driving scores) can be created and shared by the community via editing tools such as NoteFlight (Freemium) or MuseScore (Open Source), and directly imported, currently as MusicXML.

Sharing as Central Platform Tenet

All resulting social value (including discussion) can be community moderated, with new implementation initiatives under the direction and control of the community as a whole.

Adequately funded, those involved in their development can focus their attention on technical execution. The goal is to build social value over time.

Building on this 'open-everything' model, the resulting animations would, for example, be made available to the whole community, allowing them to be brought on demand into the central animation panel.

Animation will be submitted via an established code repository such as Github.

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Keywords

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online music learning, online music lessons	distance music learning, distance music lessons	remote music lessons, remote music learning
p2p music lessons, p2p music learning	music visualisation music visualization	musical instrument models interactive music instrument models
music theory tools musical theory	p2p music interworking p2p musical interworking	comparative musicology ethnomusicology
world music international music	folk music traditional music	P2P musical interworking, Peer-to-peer musical interworking
WebGL, Web3D, WebVR, WebAR	Virtual Reality, Augmented or Mixed Reality	Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning
Scalar Vector Graphics, SVG	3D Cascading Style Sheets, CSS3D	X3Dom, XML3D