Learning the harmonic analysis: is visualization an effective approach?

Understanding the structure of music compositions requires an ability built over time, through the study of the music theory and the application of countless hours of practice. In particular for beginner learners, it can be a time-consuming and a tedious task due to the steep learning curve, especially for classical music. In this work we focus on a specific type of classical music composition, that is music in chorale style. Composing such type of music requires the study of rules that are related to many structural aspects of music, such as melodic and mainly harmonic aspects. To overcome these difficulties, interdisciplinary techniques could be exploited to understand whether extra (visual) information, provided through a specific software tool, could be useful to improve learning in a quick and effective way. We introduce therefore VisualHarmony, a tool that allows users to perform the harmonic analysis of music compositions by exploiting visual clues superimposed on the music scores. Since the harmonic analysis requires to identify similar tonalities and relevant degrees, the visualization approach proposed uses closest colors to represent similar tonalities and degrees. To assess the effectiveness of our idea, we performed an evaluation study involving 60 participants among experts (with a conservatory degree) and music students from conservatory classes. We derived interesting results about the overall learning capabilities (when using visualization in supporting learning) and music information retention when using VisualHarmony in a first phase to study rules, and then move on to the classic way of performing harmonization. This result allowed us to further demonstrate the effectiveness of visualization to learn classic music rules. Finally, we also obtained positive feedback about the system usability and the satisfaction of the users with regard to the easiness and the usefulness of the tested tool.