Tailors: New Music Timbre Visualizer to Entertain Music Through Imagery

TL;DR

Tailors is a novel music visualization system that effectively conveys various musical timbral features through imagery, enhancing music entertainment and user engagement based on experimental validation.

Contribution

Introduces Tailors, a new timbre visualization system that improves music imagery and entertainment, validated through user experiments and statistical analysis.

Findings

Tailors effectively conveys timbral features like warmth and brightness.

Users rated Tailors highest for timbre expression and entertainment.

Tailors enhances music experience and willingness to reuse.

Abstract

In this paper, I have implemented a timbre visualization system called Tailors. Through the experiment with 27 MIR users, Tailors was found to be effective in conveying timbral warmth, brightness, depth, shallowness, hardness, roughness, and sharpness features of music compared to the only music condition and basic visualization. All scores of Tailors in the music imagery and music entertainment surveys were valued highest among the three conditions. Multiple linear regression analysis between timbre-imagery and imagery-entertainment shows significant and positive correlations. Coefficients comparing results from Fisher Transformation show that Tailors made user's music entertainment better through improved music visual imagery. The post-survey result represents that Tailors ranked first for the best timbre expression, music experience, and willingness to use it again. While some users felt a burden in the eye, Tailors left the future work of the data-driven approach of the mapping rule of timbre visualization to gain consent from many users. Furthermore, reducing timbre features to focus on features that Tailors can express well was also discussed, with future work of Tailors in a more artistic way using the sense of space.