Designing Visual Guides for Casual Listeners of Live Orchestral Music

The experience of attending live orchestra performances is rich in cultural heritage and can be emotionally moving; however, for those unfamiliar with classical music, it can be intimidating. In this work, we explore the use of visual listening guides to supplement live performances with information that supports the casual listener’s increased engagement. We employ human-centred design practices to evaluate a currently implemented guide with users, from which we extracted design requirements. We then identify dimensions of a music piece that may be visualized and created sample guide designs. Finally, we presented these designs to experts of visualization and music theory. Feedback from the two evaluations informs design implications to consider when creating visual guides of classical music for casual listeners.