Teaching Musical Expression through Visualization of Musical Cues

Many musicians agree that some music recital performances seem more academic than artistic. These performances fail to convey the character of the music. An important aspect of teaching music is to develop abilities of students in musical expression. Performance studies have shown that music teachers and students are often unaware of tools they could utilize to develop musical expression. In order to find a solution to this problem, this paper based its groundwork on Patrick Juslin's GERMS model. The GERMS model provides a mechanism to conceptualize musical expressions as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. In this work we introduce an innovative visualization model named EmoGraph that can be used to visualize the emotional expression aspects of music scores using the GERMS model in order to help the students grasp the cues of musical expressions. This visualization tool helps to capture the cues for emotional expressions in a musical score for the purpose of using it as a teaching tool to teach musical expressions. This work also introduces an experimental setup that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed teaching tool at an undergraduate academic environment.