Visual and Aural: Visualization of Harmony in Music with Colour

Music is strongly intertwined with everyday life, however its inner structure may not be comprehensible to everyone. Using other senses like vision can help us to understand the music better and produce a synergy between two senses. For this purpose we designed a prototype visualization that shows the structure of music and represents harmony with colour by connecting similar aspects in music and visual perception. We improve current visualization methods by calculating a common colour for a group of concurrent tones based on harmonic relationships between tones. Moreover we extend the colour calculation to broader temporal segments to enable visualization of harmonic structure of a piece. The basis for mapping of tones to colour is the key-spanning circle of thirds combined with the colour wheel. The resulting visualization is rendered in real time and can be interactively explored.