Off the Staff

An experiment in visualizing notes from music scores

Seeing music

Each dot represents a note in the score. Pitch is indicated by the distance from the center of the image, while the time at which the note occurs is given by the angle from the 12 o'clock position. The size of the dot indicates the duration of the note, and the color of the dot is different for each instrument.

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How they were made

Vivaldi's Four Seasons

The Four Seasons by Antonio Vivaldi


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OpenScore

I am proud to be a partner and provide the artwork for OpenScore, a new initiative to liberate public domain music using MuseScore, the leading open-source music notation program.


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How they were made

I can't read music but I can parse it. The talent of reading music has always escaped me which is a little ironic considering I grew up in a musical family. However, I've always enjoyed how sheet music looks so I took a shot at visualizing the notes from musical scores and the result is this series of posters.

Scores for single instruments use a single color. See Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star for a simple example below.

How images for single instruments were made

Scores for multiple instruments use color as an added dimension to differentiate instruments. See the variation on Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star below. Single color versions are also available.

How images for multiple instruments were made

Part 1 Part 2     Includes early versions and tools used.


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