Frank Heyen

Frank Heyen, Michael Sedlmair

Musicians mostly have to rely on their ears when they want to analyze what they play, for example to detect errors. Since hearing is sequential, it is not possible to quickly grasp an overview over one or multiple recordings of a whole piece of music at once. We therefore propose various visualizations that allow analyzing errors and stylistic variance. Our current approach focuses on rhythm and uses MIDI data for simplicity.

Frank Heyen, Michael Sedlmair

We contribute two design studies for augmented reality visualizations that support learning musical instruments. First, we designed simple, glanceable encodings for drum kits, which we display through a projector. As second instrument, we chose guitar and designed visualizations to be displayed either on a screen as an augmented mirror or as an optical see-through AR headset. These modalities allow us to also show information around the instrument and in 3D. We evaluated our prototypes through case studies and our results demonstrate the general effectivity and revealed design-related and technical limitations.

Daniel Klötzl, Tim Krake, Frank Heyen et al.

The depiction of scanpaths from mobile eye-tracking recordings by thumbnails from the stimulus allows the application of visual computing to detect areas of interest in an unsupervised way. We suggest using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) to identify such areas in stimuli. For a user-defined integer k, NMF produces an explainable decomposition into k components, each consisting of a spatial representation associated with a temporal indicator. In the context of multiple eye-tracking recordings, this leads to k spatial representations, where the temporal indicator highlights the appearance within recordings. The choice of k provides an opportunity to control the refinement of the decomposition, i.e., the number of areas to detect. We combine our NMF-based approach with visualization techniques to enable an exploratory analysis of multiple recordings. Finally, we demonstrate the usefulness of our approach with mobile eye-tracking data of an art gallery.

Gerrit J. Rijken, Rene Cutura, Frank Heyen et al.

The logos of metal bands can be by turns gaudy, uncouth, or nearly illegible. Yet, these logos work: they communicate sophisticated notions of genre and emotional affect. In this paper we use the design considerations of metal logos to explore the space of "illegible semantics": the ways that text can communicate information at the cost of readability, which is not always the most important objective. In this work, drawing on formative visualization theory, professional design expertise, and empirical assessments of a corpus of metal band logos, we describe a design space of metal logos and present a tool through which logo characteristics can be explored through visualization. We investigate ways in which logo designers imbue their text with meaning and consider opportunities and implications for visualization more widely.