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Have you ever heard a symphony performed by a live orchestra? With as many as 70 to 100 musicians playing, an orchestra provides a rich auditory experience, with complex layers of sound.
But did you ever think of the symphony as a visual experience? Sure, there are plenty of musicians to look at, but that doesn’t help you to understand the structure and story of the music itself.
If you’ve taken our “Communication Styles for Collaboration” workshop, you know the four ways we take in information: Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinaesthetic. These are the four “modalities” of learning.
When you are trying to communicate information, it will be easier to understand if you use as many modalities as possible.
Going to the symphony is largely an auditory experience. But what if you could visually experience the music, too?
Well, now you can. Musicologist Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley has developed a series of “Visual Listening Guides” that map out the music with icons, colour, and graphical representations of important musical themes. Regardless of your musical background, these Visual Listening Guides give you a birds-eye view of an orchestral work. They visually present the structure, important sonic landmarks, key instruments, and development and recurrence of musical themes. You get extra “at-a-glance” information that follows the music without distracting you with lots of text.
Check out the guide below, which outlines the first movement of Beethoven's famous Symphony No. 5. Try following along while watching the first 7 minutes of this video of the piece. (That's John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique.)
[EDIT: The original video was removed from YouTube. Try this one instead, the West-Eastern Divan Orcestra, conducted by Daneil Barenboim in 2012.]
Adding the visual element enriches the listening experience by making it easier to understand. Can you think of other real-world examples of visual and auditory modalities being used together for richer understanding?
For more information about Chan-Hartley’s Visual Listening Guides, visit https://www.symphonygraphique.com.
But did you ever think of the symphony as a visual experience? Sure, there are plenty of musicians to look at, but that doesn’t help you to understand the structure and story of the music itself.
If you’ve taken our “Communication Styles for Collaboration” workshop, you know the four ways we take in information: Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinaesthetic. These are the four “modalities” of learning.
When you are trying to communicate information, it will be easier to understand if you use as many modalities as possible.
Going to the symphony is largely an auditory experience. But what if you could visually experience the music, too?
Well, now you can. Musicologist Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley has developed a series of “Visual Listening Guides” that map out the music with icons, colour, and graphical representations of important musical themes. Regardless of your musical background, these Visual Listening Guides give you a birds-eye view of an orchestral work. They visually present the structure, important sonic landmarks, key instruments, and development and recurrence of musical themes. You get extra “at-a-glance” information that follows the music without distracting you with lots of text.
Check out the guide below, which outlines the first movement of Beethoven's famous Symphony No. 5. Try following along while watching the first 7 minutes of this video of the piece. (That's John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Revolutionaire et Romantique.)
[EDIT: The original video was removed from YouTube. Try this one instead, the West-Eastern Divan Orcestra, conducted by Daneil Barenboim in 2012.]
Adding the visual element enriches the listening experience by making it easier to understand. Can you think of other real-world examples of visual and auditory modalities being used together for richer understanding?
For more information about Chan-Hartley’s Visual Listening Guides, visit https://www.symphonygraphique.com.
Audio read and recorded by Fawn Fritzen.