New Approach to Timbre Visualization

Music visualization has become an integral part of music performance, appreciation, and study. Even before computers, people have tried to visualize different aspects of music. Today, music visualization is conducted on a wide variety of musical characteristics, of which timbre is one of the least visualized. Moreover, timbre is commonly labeled with semantic descriptors that vary from person to person, and therefore it is difficult to quantify and categorize. Through the analysis of audio spectral characteristics, we have devised method to create a timbre-to-color conversion. The proposed conversion was successfully tested on different users and hence can be used for further improvement.