Shaping music in performance

(Daniel Leech-Wilkinson – King's College London)

Project overview | Performers' perspectives | Representations | Visualisations | Mechanisms | Recruitment for current studies | Workshops | Music and Shape conference

Representations: visualisations of sound and music

Research on this strand of the 'Shapes' project is undertaken by Mats Küssner and explores people's visualisations of sound and music. The active process of shaping music visually allows insights into many aspects of music perception, cognition and behaviour, two of which Mats is studying more closely: first, cross-modal processes involved in sound/music perception, and secondly, aspects of motor behaviour involved in tracking sound shapes.

Initially exploring and considering various approaches to shaping music in performance, Mats has run his first experiment, in which he asked musicians and non-musicians to represent sound and music visually in a ‘drawing performance's: the participants'; task was to follow and represent the shape of sequences of pure tones varying in pitch, loudness and tempo in real-time by means of an electronic graphics tablet. This method, called MUVISTAB (MUsic VISualized by means of a graphics TABlet), was developed in close collaboration with Nicolas Gold who provided the capturing software. Digitised measurements of position and pressure applied to the pen were analysed to disclose aspects of the very act of shaping sound in a free drawing paradigm. Some findings from musicians' and non-musicians' visual representations of sound have already been presented at national and international conferences, and it is envisaged that Mats' research will enable access to further levels of analysis by studying both products and processes of sound visualisations.

An overview of Mats' work can be found on his academia website and a summary of his PhD work is also available on YouTube.