EVERYDAY EXPERIENCE 

The everyday experience I have chosen is listening to music, or playing an instrument. I have been playing violin for 11 years now, and believe that the act of playing an instrument or listening to music could benefit from data representation. I believe it would be incredibly beneficial to the listener to have a real time interface that would display a web of characteristics relating to the music that is being played.

Learning to read music can be difficult, but building musicality can take years (sometimes decades?) of listening, observing, and practicing. Musicality, meaning ‘sensitivity to, knowledge of, or talent for music’ (Merriam-Webster).

COMMUNICATE 

So, I believe that a great way for people to get a better understanding of musical elements would be to display a real time graph (or web) of characteristics for that particular song, artist, or composer. This web could be real-time, as you’re listening to the song – so as the song progresses, if certain elements are added, it can present them to notify the listener that there was a change in structure or style.

To gather the needed data, scanning the internet for frequent terms associated with a composer or specific piece/genre of music. There are several documents, journals, articles, blogs, etc. that describe the musical elements related to a piece of music. The characteristics that I’d search for would be the specific musical elements of the song.