I personally have a great interest in the classical music genre, as I have played piano myself. When I listen to different performances by various pianists, I can identify the pianist by only using my ear, but I cannot visually see the differences or talk clearly about them without additional evidence. The complicated nature behind pianists' playing styles is that they employ two layers of musical thoughts. The first layer of thought is from the composer. The composer builds the piece of music to reflect personal interests, cultural ideas or even social issues. The performers study the composer’s intention, notation, instructions and purpose to construct their own interpretations and naturally express those in personal styles. In this respect, the musical message they convey not only has unique perspectives of the composer, sometimes from long ago, but also from the moment of performance by a particular pianist. These are merged in each performance to convey a sound that reflects all the influences on the music. Through the dynamic markings on a manuscript or score and the liberty and creativity of each pianist’s playing they can even resonate with an audience hundreds of years after the original composition was created.

These visualizations were created using TouchDesigner. The same audio file is used as the input, and the same FFT method is used to analyze the sound. When the audio is being played in parallel, each sound fragment is plotted to rotate. The keyboard's outer circles are the lower portions of the keyboards, while the inner circles indicate the higher frequency and higher notes on the keyboard. The whiteness of the hue represents intensity; a stronger whiteness in color indicates a more powerful attack on the keyboard. When comparing this to librosa's earlier research, the general analysis is the same but presented in a different format. In this distinct style, the material has been condensed and the focus is clearer due to the use of white visuals against a black background, which also makes for a more succinct illustration idea. For its dynamic and lively visual formats, it is a more appealing format for viewers to easily perceive how the sound is evolving, it also enables audiences who have no prior experience with music to experience the music. The animation also will create an atmosphere to narrate emotions.

The final design prototype for this study incorporates a more complete pianists’ performance to raise the question:

Is there a standard interpretation on a music piece?

It is apparent that piano pieces composed and performed over a century ago did not sound the same as with these modern pianists for reasons of factors like piano type and structure explained in the previous piano section.

Here shown in the figure is the static version of the comparative animated visualization. Each circle is drawn in the same time span and the size and color refers to the amplitude and timbre at that specific time. The timbre or the brightness of sound is calculated by finding the centroid of frequency as the weighted mean of the frequencies present in the signal, determined using a Fourier transform, with their magnitudes as the weights.