Hexaphonic guitar transcription and visualisation

Abstract

Music representation has been a widely researched topic through centuries. Transcription of music through the conventional notation system has dominated the field, for the best part of the last centuries. However, this notational system often falls short of communicating the essence of music to the masses, especially to the people with no music training. Advances in signal processing and computer science over the last few decades have bridged this gap to an extent, but conveying the meaning of music remains a challenging research field. Music visualisation is one such bridge, which we explore in this paper. This paper presents an approach to visualize guitar performances, transcribing musical events into visual forms. To achieve this, hexaphonic guitar processing is carried out (i.e. processing each of the six strings as an independent monophonic sound source) to get music descriptors, which reflect the most relevant features of a sound to define/characterise it. Once this information is obtained, our goal is to analyse how different mappings to the visual domain can meaningfully/intuitively represent music. As a final result, a system is proposed to enrich the musical listening experience, by extending the perceived auditory sensations to include visual stimuli.