CorpusVis: Visual Analysis of Digital Sheet Music Collections

TL;DR

CorpusVis is an interactive visual tool that helps music analysts explore large sheet music collections by combining computational analysis with visual interfaces, enabling new insights without requiring advanced technical skills.

Contribution

We introduce CorpusVis, a visual analytics dashboard that integrates computational methods for analyzing digital sheet music collections, making complex data accessible to music analysts.

Findings

Supports exploratory and confirmatory analysis

Helps discover new insights in music collections

Facilitates comparison of composers and musical features

Abstract

Manually investigating sheet music collections is challenging for music analysts due to the magnitude and complexity of underlying features, structures, and contextual information. However, applying sophisticated algorithmic methods would require advanced technical expertise that analysts do not necessarily have. Bridging this gap, we contribute CorpusVis, an interactive visual workspace, enabling scalable and multi-faceted analysis. Our proposed visual analytics dashboard provides access to computational methods, generating varying perspectives on the same data. The proposed application uses metadata including composers, type, epoch, and low-level features, such as pitch, melody, and rhythm. To evaluate our approach, we conducted a pair analytics study with nine participants. The qualitative results show that CorpusVis supports users in performing exploratory and confirmatory analysis, leading them to new insights and findings. In addition, based on three exemplary workflows, we demonstrate how to apply our approach to different tasks, such as exploring musical features or comparing composers.