The main use cases for this tool I can think of can be broken in to three categories:
- Education
- Commercial
- Healthcare
Education
My initial thoughts for this project were that it could be used in an educational setting. I think if the visuals from the music are clear and the correlation is obvious it could be used across a range of studies spanning all ages to have something that could be hands-on and engaging, and (I don’t know for sure because I haven’t studied film or music) different.
A simple example could be that sad music is visualised using darker colours and tones and happier music is visualised using brighter colours. If you are studying film this tool could be used to gauge the emotions throughout a scene from the music that’s being played. In another example, it could be used to help music students have an idea as to how their music will be construed based on the visualisation. On top of this, it could help show how different aspects of music yield different visuals, and by extension evoke different emotions.
I think it could also be a really engaging tool for primary school children since the number of senses being triggered when exploring music has increased.
Commercial
In a commercial sense it could be used by musicians to help build a visual backdrop which has been at most of the gigs I have been to. I think this has a similar train of thought to the primary school idea earlier, in the sense that now an artist’s music can be extended past its initial limitation of being sound and into a visual medium too.
I also thought about how people who are hard of hearing could benefit from a tool like this, especially at live events; it could potentially enhance the enjoyment of live music events for these people.
Healthcare
Part of my initial research was into synaesthesia, and I came across a really interesting TedTalk from Jamie Ward (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taKx_stlUOQ). He was talking about how our knowledge of synaesthesia means that we might one day be able to create a visual dictionary of sorts. This tool could help increase our understanding of synaesthesia. An extension to this project could incorporate some kind of customisation for users to change the visuals according to what they would like. This could be interesting if given to someone who has synaesthesia, if they are able to map what they can see to the program, and then to see if this is a general visual for people with synaesthesia, or if that condition is unique to each individual.
Another idea I had was for it to be incorporated in to therapy and psychology in some kind of way, but I don’t have any research as of yet to corroborate this idea that it could be used here.
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