Balisage Paper: Visualizing Musical Transformations
Evan Lenz
President
Lenz Consulting Group, Inc.
<evan@lenzconsulting.com>
Evan Lenz lives in Indianola, Washington, a small wooded beach town on the Port Madison Indian Reservation. In his consulting work, he has lately been helping mechanics fix cars and C++ developers grok APIs, all while knowing very little about either (cars or C++). Such is the life of an XML developer! In his spare time, he writes and sings songs that keep his spirit happy and his mind in check.
Copyright ©2021 by the author. Used by permission.
Abstract
Musical transformations can be useful for analysis and learning. Using Bach's Prelude in C (BWV 846), we visualize the relationship between the original score and its transformations, using XML, XSLT, SVG, and a customization of the xslt-visualizer tool introduced at Balisage 2016. How might we represent the relationships between two SVG outputs of a multi-stage transformation (MusicXML to MusicXML to SVG)? How can we collapse an XML document's lineage? In other words, how might we visualize a multi-stage transformation as one step? And, in the case of musical notes, hear it too? Please see the online slide presentation for more details and full results of this fun experiment.