Sean Smith and Glen Williams, both from Texas A&M University wrote about visualising music in “A Visualization of Music”.
Published in 1997, they introduce the subject by stating that music notation is the most popular form of visualising method at the time. They then go on to propose their own method of visualising music that “makes use of color and three-dimensional space”.
They are able to map music data in to three-dimensional space by looking at individual tones, and then looking for instruments within a particular orchestration. Touching on the use of pitches and the range of pitches, it might be beneficial to look at minimum and maximum pitch values and then scale appropriately for that, rather than just have the entire range.
Smith and Williams then have individual instruments “mapped” to particular values. They also take rhythm in to account by mapping instruments playing at certain time periods, although I’m not sure how this would be helpful here as the audio is dynamic and doesn’t have to have a fixed rhythm.
References
Smith, S.M., and G.N. Williams. ‘A Visualization of Music’. In Proceedings. Visualization ’97 (Cat. No. 97CB36155), 499–503, 1997. https://doi.org/10.1109/VISUAL.1997.663931.
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