Music instructors strive to visually represent music in ways that may be easily and quickly understood by students. This is particularly important for non-majoring students who might not have formal musical training. How can visual representation make music intuitive while also providing insight to sociocultural phenomena? In what ways might indigenous epistemologies lend to sound visualization? Is it possible to remain legible while attempting to eschew colonial forms of knowledge production?
Drawing from six semesters of teaching music at CUNY, this presentation reflects on how digitally animated visualizations of Ghanain drumming, Hindustani ragas and talas, and Javanese gamelan were incoporated into explanatory teaching and embodied classroom exercises. This set of experiences elucidates theories of notation, explains visualization methods, and speculates future use cases. This presentation is of particular interest to digital humanities practitioners who do translation work between different media and/or senses.
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