Interactive Application for Visualisation of the Form of Written Postmodern Music

The contemporary visual epoch with fast software development not only requires scientific data visualisation applications, but also offers possibilities of creation of these applications. Music theory data, especially the structure of music works, acquires a special attention in such a context. The significant application implementation of electronic music structure visualisation was done by the GRM group in the ‘Acousmographe’ application which presents different kind of texture as graphical figures of different configurations. Martin Wattenberg attempts to analyze the structure of the written music in his ‘The Shape of Song’ application, where repeated, identical passages of a composition are connected by translucent arches. Such a method works with simeple one-line melody data, however, complex structures with polyphonic features need other approaches. The problem that appears in the structure visualisation of music works of professional composers consists in the difficulty of application of some general approach to reach the appropriate form of visualisation of the given structure. In this context, the software application for interactive visualisation of the organ piece ‘Mein Weg’ of Arvo Pärt was built using the Python programming language. The main idea of this application consists of two general rules. The first rule assumes the simultaneity of visual and audio parts, so the structure could be seen as processing during the music performance. The second rule is based on interactivity of the whole process, so the recipient could manage the process of execution and what appears at the screen. The graphical approach used for the given application is a result of the musicological analysis of the organ piece ‘Mein Weg’ of Arvo Pärt published by the author in 2012.