Designing Sound Representations For Musicology

Overview & Synopsis

This article describes the use of representations based on data extracted from the audio signal (sonogram, chromagram, audio descriptor) in musicology. A first part gives the historical context of these representations and discusses their transfer from the field of exact sciences to musicology. In the second part, we propose three new types of representation particularly effective in musical analysis: visualizations based on waveform and amplitude, a multilayered sonogram and chromagram, and an interface to assist the interpretation of selfsimilarity matrices for the analysis of musical forms and microstructures.