To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually?Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music,
Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation.
Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques,
Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.
To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually?
Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation.
Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.
Eric Isaacson is expertly trained to see "the subtleties in how various kinds of visual images, representations, diagrams, and displays communicate, or fail to readily convey, crucial information" according to praise from Robert Hatten. He has published, presented, and taught on visualizing music for over 28 years.
This book serves music scholars by offering a guide to effectively communicate visually. It has the potential to spark further research leading to the development of new approaches in visualization and expansions to existing methodologies.
Visualizations are powerful agents of musical meaning, so publication as part of IUP's Musical Meaning and Interpretation series is fitting.
The target audience includes scholars and advanced students in music theory, musicology, and visualization in the arts.
