LayerIt combines music scores and timing in one interactive view
LayerIt: Towards a Framework for Time-Aligned, Composable Music Visualizations
SoundMultimedia
Summary
Music has both what’s written on sheet music and how it’s actually played in time. But usually, pictures showing these two things are separate or manually combined. The authors created LayerIt, a tool that automatically merges music notation and timing information on the same timeline. This helps people see where the beat tracker or the performance differs from what’s written, all in one clear image.
What this means in practice
- •For music technologists: Visualize beat tracking results alongside musical scores to identify timing mismatches and improve music analysis tools.
- •For interactive media developers: Create synchronized music and visual content that aligns score notation with performance time for more engaging experiences.
Authors
Fernando Azeredo, António Sá Pinto
Abstract
Music information retrieval often relates signal-derived, algorithmic, and symbolic information across different coordinate systems. Existing visualizations typically leave notation separate from physical time, while composites that combine them are assembled by hand. We present LayerIt, an open-source Python library for composing independent representations with notation on a shared performance-time axis. Given a score warped into performance time and a note-level alignment, LayerIt emits a single SVG that preserves the score's MEI structure and keeps added components identifiable and restylable. We demonstrate this through a challenging beat-tracking analysis, in which tracker output, signal representations, and notation can be inspected together to locate metrical disagreement and other errors against both notated structure and performed time.