# Augmenting Music Sheets with Harmonic Fingerprints

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual augmentation technique for digital music sheets using harmonic fingerprint glyphs based on the circle of fifths, aiding both experts and learners in harmonic pattern recognition without replacing conventional notation.

## Contribution

It presents a novel harmonic fingerprint visualization that complements traditional music notation, enhancing harmonic understanding without requiring extensive training or replacing existing notation.

## Key findings

- Supports harmonic pattern identification and comparison tasks
- Improves task performance without close-reading of the score
- Effective for both experts and non-experts

## Abstract

Conventional Music Notation (CMN) is the well-established foundation for the written communication of musical information, such as rhythm, harmony, or timbre. However, CMN suffers from the complexity of its visual encoding and the need for extensive training to acquire proficiency and legibility. While alternative notations using additional visual variables (such as color to improve pitch identification) have been proposed, the music community does not readily accept notation systems that vary widely from the CMN. Therefore, to support student musicians in understanding the harmonic relationship of notes, instead of replacing the CMN, we present a visualization technique that augments a digital music sheet with a harmonic fingerprint glyph. Our design exploits the circle of fifths - a fundamental concept in music theory, as a visual metaphor. By attaching these visual glyphs to each bar of a selected composition we provide additional information about the salient harmonic features available in a musical piece. We conducted a user study to analyze the performance of experts and non-experts in an identification and comparison task of recurring patterns. The evaluation shows that the harmonic fingerprint supports these tasks without the need for close-reading, as when compared to a not-annotated music sheet.