Congratulations to Prof. Eric Isaacson on the publication of his book, Visualizing Music, a resource for anyone who creates musical graphics for use in their scholarship and teaching. It was released on May 2, 2023, by Indiana University Press as part of its “Musical Meaning and Interpretation” series, edited by former Jacobs School faculty member Robert S. Hatten (University of Texas, Austin). It is available on their website as a hard cover, paperback, and e-Book/Kindle editions. and is available on their website as well as other various online booksellers.
From the publisher’s website:
“Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation.
“Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to the material.”
Prof. Isaacson is Associate Professor of Music Theory and former Director of Graduate Studies at the IU Jacobs School of Music. He worked as the principal designer for Music Fundamentals Online, a web-based course in music fundamentals, and was a major force in the Variations2: The IU Digital Music Library project, funded by the National Science Foundation. He is also a faculty member in the IU Cognitive Science Program and holds an adjunct appointment in the IU School of Informatics and Computing.
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