Visualizing the chromatic index of music

Abstract

Musical imaging is a recent trend in visualizing "hidden" dimensions of one-dimensional audio signals. The ascription of colors to psychoacoustic phenomena is consistent to the music perception depicted in the variety of scales and styles of ethnic music. Audio tools based on software engineering techniques are built for visualizing the chrominance of global music. This work presents MEL-IRIS, an audio tool that supports the chromatic indexing of music. Chromatic description can be used for classification, identification, making queries based on emotion and characterization of the style of an artist. Chromatic metadata can comprise a novel way in music retrieval in Web-based applications.