Synaesthetic Analysis, Exploring Music Structures by Multimedia Representation. PrometheusZ12, a Novel 3D Visualization Tool

Visual representations have always been fundamental tools to communicate about music. While common music notation was for centuries the standard way to encode western music information, different visual representations were developed and exploited by music analysis. The importance of such representations lies in their great explanatory power. The real-time exhibition of visual models of music features joins together aesthetic and analytical perspectives, favoring the comprehension of analytic systems. In this article I present PrometheusZ12, a novel 3D visual representation tool for music, based on the concept of product GIS introduced by D. Lewin. As suggested by its name, a tribute to the synesthaetic explorations of A. Scriabin, the software involves Z12, the well known mathematical model of the pitch class space, providing the real-time geometrical rendering of the product extensions of Z12 with some rhythmic models.