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Musical Vision: an interactive bio-inspired sonification tool to convert images into music

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Abstract

Musical Vision is a highly flexible, interactive and bio-inspired sonification tool that translates color images into harmonic polyphonic music by mimicking the human visual system in terms of its field of vision and photosensitive sensors. Putting the user at the center of the sonification process, Musical Vision allows the interactive design of fully configurable mappings between the color space and the MIDI instruments and audio pitch spaces to tailor the music rendering results to the application needs. Moreover, Musical Vision incorporates a harmonizer capable of introducing the necessary modifications to create melodies using harmonic chords. Above all else, Musical Vision is an extremely flexible system that the user can interactively configure to convert an image into either a few seconds or a several minutes long musical piece. Thus, it can be used, for instance, with trans-artistic purposes like the conversion of a painting into music, for augmenting vision with music, or for learning musical skills such as sol-fa. To evaluate the proposed sonification tool, we conducted a pilot user study, in which twelve volunteers were tested to interpret images containing geometric patterns from music rendered by Musical Vision. Results show that even those users with no musical education background were able to achieve nearly 70% accuracy in multiple choice tests after less than 25 min training. Moreover, users with some musical education were capable of accurately “drawing by ear” the images from no other stimuli than the sonifications.

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Notes

  1. See Sensory substitution for the blind: a walk in the garden wearing The vOICe at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xRgfaUJkdM (last accessed on October 2018).

  2. In general terms, people are more used to the idea of describing colors as a mixture of primary colors, be it subtractive or additive (for instance, yellow equals red plus green in the additive color system). Instead, getting users to internalize the description of colors in terms of its HSV components would require a certain training.

  3. See Fig. 3 in Sect. 3.2.2 for details on how this correspondences are made depending on how the music rendering process is configured by the user.

  4. The decision of which pixels will sound simultaneously is intimately related to the image scanning process, which is described in Sect. 3.2.2.

  5. Please visit https://goo.gl/4l6wfz.

  6. As regards the Image processing module, the following parameters are presented: visual field number, color information reduction strength, and polyphonic rules (polyphony distribution and simultaneous notes). As for the Music rendering module, the following configuration parameters are provided: image scanning pattern (referred to as Scan type), the degree of harmonization applied on each visual field region (in %). Moreover, information about the Vector spaces module is provided in terms of the predefined chord mapping employed, as well as data regarding the Differentiation tools applied and the tempo.

  7. The designed test is available online at http://goo.gl/lWdgrz.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. GTM - Grup de Recerca en Tecnologies Mèdia, La Salle - Universitat Ramon Llull, Quatre Camins, 30, 08022, Barcelona, Spain

    Antonio Polo & Xavier Sevillano

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  1. Antonio Polo
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  2. Xavier Sevillano
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Correspondence to Xavier Sevillano.

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Polo, A., Sevillano, X. Musical Vision: an interactive bio-inspired sonification tool to convert images into music. J Multimodal User Interfaces 13, 231–243 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12193-018-0280-4

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