An Interactive, Multimedia Environment for Exploring Tonal Pitch Space

J. Kent Williams (1)

1 School of Music

Because they depict relations among musical pitches, chords, and key, charts in Fred Lerdahl's Tonal Pitch Space can be rendered more accurately and vividly with multimedia authoring software. My renderings enable a user to orient charts toward any specific key, trace any of numerous possible paths, determine the depth of embedding of any element in any tonal context, and compute distances between elements. Lerdahl's analyses can be depicted more vividly by synchronizing graphic images with the corresponding music. Graphic representations have proven to be effective instructional tools, especially when used to illustrate abstract concepts. Multimedia realizations should prove even more effective when used in appropriate contexts.

Keywords: graphical representation

Domains: Technology for Human Learning

J. Kent Williams. An Interactive, Multimedia Environment for Exploring Tonal Pitch Space. Conference ICL2007, September 26 -28, 2007, 2007, Villach, Austria. 12 p. ⟨hal-00197232⟩