We propose a visual analysis approach to explore the compositional process of composers in Spectral School, with a particular focus on the sub-processes of sound analysis and synthesis. Spectral music is one of the significant trends in contemporary music since the 1970s. Composers in Spectral School use the acoustic properties of sound spectra as the basis of their compositional materials. One of the representative software systems they use is AudioSculpt, which has been developed by IRCAM. We have developed an accompanying system with AudioSculpt to represent the history of creating sounds with spectral analysis of sound materials and processing of sound spectra using the various filters. The salient feature of the system lies in its stacked spectrogram space whose axes represent the elapsed time of the sound and the progress of composition. On the pixeloriented spatial substrate, the system makes it possible for users to analyze the compositional processes by dedicated interactive manipulations. As such, the users are allowed to examine the compositional processes of musical pieces, whereas primary targets of most previous studies were only completed pieces. The present system can also be regarded as an initial attempt at managing the provenance of timeseries events in music visualization field. Our approach is intended to open a door for the composers to develop and share the compositional methodologies.
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