Representing Musical Relationships in the Harmony Grid

Abstract

One of the most difficult questions of multimedia design is when is it appropriate to use a given medium or mode of interaction. Sometimes the answer is not as obvious as it might seem. For instance, a program which manipulates music obviously has to be capable of playing music, presenting auditory information, but to what extent should the interface to the program be an auditory one? This chapter describes one such program which teaches about music, but with which the student interacts using a two-dimensional spatial representation of musical relationships. In other words a cross-modality mapping occurs. This kind of mapping appears to be especially successful because variants of it have been applied to good educational effect more than once. Indeed, Chapter 12 describes a successful use of a different but closely related cross-modality mapping. A very interesting and open question is: why is this mapping appropriate, where others may not be?