Demo: Large-Scale Visualisations of Chord Sequence Patterns

Try out the visualisation at: http://dml.city.ac.uk/chordseqvis/

In the Digital Music Lab project we work on the automatic analysis of large audio databases. As a part of this process we have extracted chord sequence patterns in over a million tracks from the “I Like Music” commercial music collection. To allow for visual analysis and exploration of this new derived data by experts, we have created visualisations that expose frequent patterns and structures.

The interface that we have created mostly represents root movement and chord qualities geometrically. We use two individually configurable views in parallel to encourage the comparison between different representations of a corpus highlighting complimentary musical aspects as well as to emphasizes differences between datasets, here representing different genres. We apply and adapt existing several visualisation techniques, such as:

  • linked grid
  • linked circular grid
  • origin-destination grid
  • parallel coordinate plot
  • chord-based tonnetz

Try out the visualisation at: http://dml.city.ac.uk/chordseqvis/!