A Survey of Music Visualization Techniques

Abstract

Music Information Research (MIR) comprises all the research topics involved in modeling and understanding music. Visualizations are frequently adopted to convey better understandings about music pieces, and the association of music with visual elements has been practiced historically and extensively. We investigated papers related to music visualization and organized the proposals into categories according to their most prominent aspects: their input features, the aspects visualized, the InfoVis technique(s) used, if interaction was provided, and users’ evaluations. The MIR and the InfoVis community can benefit by identifying trends and possible new research directions within the music visualization topic.