Seeing music
Each dot represents a note in the score. Pitch is indicated by the distance from the center of the image, while the time at which the note occurs is given by the angle from the 12 o'clock position. The size of the dot indicates the duration of the note, and the color of the dot is different for each instrument.
The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi
Watch
I am proud to be a partner and provide the artwork for OpenScore, a new initiative to liberate public domain music using MuseScore, the leading open-source music notation program.
All posters
How they were made
I can't read music but I can parse it. The talent of reading music has always escaped me which is a little ironic considering I grew up in a musical family. However, I've always enjoyed how sheet music looks so I took a shot at visualizing the notes from musical scores and the result is this series of posters.
Scores for single instruments use a single color. See Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star for a simple example below.
Scores for multiple instruments use color as an added dimension to differentiate instruments. See the variation on Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star below. Single color versions are also available.
Part 1 Part 2 Includes early versions and tools used.
Press
- A Designer Reimagined Classic Music Scores as Colorful Data Visualizations, September 8, 2016, Slate
- See Classical Music Scores Re-Imagined As Colorful Art, September 8, 2016, SheetMusicDirect
- Klassische Musik als Datenvisualisierungen, September 8, 2016, Nerdcore
- Check out what some great compositions look like in pictures, September 19, 2016, CMUSE
- Showcase, Longlist, Shortlist, September 21, 2016, Information is Beautiful Awards 2016
- Classical music visualized, October 5, 2016, FlowingData
- Seeing Music, October 5, 2016, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Stories
- Off the Staff, November 12, 2016, Staccato, KMFA
- The 45 Most Creative Infographics of 2016, November 29, 2016, Column Five, also Visual News
- Seeing Music, December 7, 2016, Brands of Tomorrow
- Best of the visualisation web... October 2016, December 9, 2016, Visualising Data
- WIRED Magazine, December 2016 issue
- Infoporn: Sprawling graphics help you 'see' how beautiful the music in Vivaldi's Four Seasons is, December 15, 2016, WIRED UK
- Visualizing Music: The Four Seasons by Vivaldi, June 12, 2017, Reddit: Data is Beautiful
- OpenScore Kickstarter campaign, June 29, 2017, Kickstarter
- Openscore’s plans to liberate sheet music, June 30, 2017, Creative Commons
- What does music look like?, April 18, 2018, Dyson on Medium
- Designer brings Pachelbel’s Canon to life, July 31, 2018, ABC Classic FM
- Sonata form explained through Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor, August 24, 2018, ABC Classic FM
- Off the Staff: An Experiment in Visualizing Notes from Music Scores, June 12, 2020, Patterns
