Tag cloud for the Aura

The aura of instruments is pictured in the form of a tag cloud. It shows the resulting instruments, described by words aggregated from the matched musical pieces. The arrangement of words is automatically determined by a force directed graph drawing algorithm (Kobourov 2012), in which each item is a node and the links between them represent joint appearances in the same category. This leads to forming clusters, inspired by TagPies (Jänicke et al. 2018). In the cloud’s center, each instrument is symbolized by its image, or a placeholder image in a circle. The words, whose sizes are determined according to the number of occurrences, are taken from four different attributes of musical works, and, additionally, the titles of the instruments. So the words appear in five different colors to quickly depict the instrument’s aura visually. In most cases, the largest cluster (in purple) is built by the tokenized titles of the musical pieces found in the matching process. Due to the variety of possible languages, we did not apply further language processing like stemming or lemmatization. Nevertheless, the token sets are cleaned through stopword lists of the most frequently used languages like German, English, and Italian. 

Furthermore, the names of the musical piece composers constitute the second cluster (in green) of the tag cloud. Due to the length of full names, they were cropped and only the surname is displayed. Thanks to the additional meta-information about the composers, the user can inspect the details by hovering the name tags and see the composer’s full name and lifetime. Additionally, genre names (in red) and languages (in blue) of the manuscripts are displayed in separate word clusters of the tag cloud. 

The Protestant Trombone

The visual exploration of a trombone (MIMO 2011b) originating Nuremberg, Germany has been described in our previous paper (Kusnick et al. 2020). The inspection of matched pieces on the map reveals that they were performed in some cities close to Nuremberg. The tag cloud highlights that the most frequently matching genre is the opera (closely related to “Singspiele”), and German (“ger”) as the major language. Frequent terms in the titles are “Zauberflöte” and “Giovanni”, in which trombones were used, as well as “Mozart” as the corresponding composer. A closer look reveals many terms related to religion. German cantatas, sacred songs and numerous names including words like “Herr” (lord), “herrlich” (wonderful), but also “Sünden” (sins) and “Opferfest” (sacrifice) from Peter von Winter and Georg Philipp Telemann are found in the resulting list of musical piece tags prominent in the word cloud. The musicologist working with this use case commented that the denomination was very important around 1800. Additionally, he took the predominant denomination of the piece performances’ locations into account. All cities were predominantly Protestant, except the Catholic Munich. Thus, the trombone from Nuremberg may be better auralized through Protestant songs from one of the culturally closer cities like Frankfurt am Main, even though it is geographically farther away than Munich. Clicking “Cantatas” shows a list of all cantatas in the musical piece matches, for example “Ertönet bald herrlich ihr letzten Posaunen” (Telemann 1741) (also tagged as a sacred song) having even “Posaune” (trombone) in its title. The song was performed in Frankfurt am Main and was composed by Georg Philipp Telemann who is tagged as evangelic in the musiXplora (musiXplora 2020).

Figure 1: The generated tag cloud for a trombone from Leipzig, Germany and its matched compositions within a range of 50 years and 200 kilometers.

Lutes and Lute-like Instruments

The history of plucked instruments like lutes and lute-likes is pictured by a second use case. Three dedicated epochs are visible in the timeline in Figure 2, and the corresponding tag cloud is viewable in Figure 3a.

The first epoch (1620–1760) refers to the classical lute, indicating a very sparse occupancy due to the low amount of pieces dedicated for lutes in RISM. However, a wide distribution of genres is depicted in the word cloud in Figure 3b. 

The second epoch (1770–1810) is characterized by numerous precise datings (see Figure 2) for the production of the instruments. This might be contractual works commissioned by the courtly society because lutes were highly appreciated instruments at that time. Also, the word cloud gets more dense and manifold (Figure 3c), especially, the amount of mandolins increases.

The third epoch (1870–1960) is marked by very uncertain production dates because of their more industrial production, visually encoded by more transparent and wider red ovals in the timeline. Also, this episode was the time where lutes and lute-like instruments only survived by being transformed into bass-lutes or guitars to play roles in operas because they were not part of uprising orchestras, as seen in Figure 3d.

Figure 2: All found lutes and lute-like instruments with their matching piece performances within a distance of 50 years and 100 kilometers around the instrument events. For details, see the original publication (Kusnick et al. 2020).

Figure 3: Four different tag clouds for lutes and lute-like instruments summarizing all pairings of instruments and compositions for the time ranges (a) 1620–1960, (b) 1620–1760, (c) 1760–1870, and (d) 1870–1960.