Judging A Score by Its Cover: The Role of Visual Design in Interpreting Colour Scores

Music notation is typically viewed to be an interface for the transfer of musical information, with a performer's individual interpretation of a score determining the aural outcome. Performers rely on learned symbols and context clues to interpret a score, supplemented by semantic information inferred by the style and font of the score. When scores contain novel graphic elements that have no standardised framework for interpretation, such as colour and shape, the semantic information contained in the visual presentation of the graphics becomes integral in influencing a player's unique interpretation. Though marketing and graphic design literature demonstrate the clear importance of visual design in mediating the relationship between viewer and media, examination of this phenomena remains remarkably absent from score analysis. In this paper, I use colour as the primary lens through which to explore the role of visual design in mediating a performer's response to a score. I present three original and visually distinct compositions as case studies, each uniquely demonstrating the role of colour and peripheral extra-musical content as mediators of interpretation. I centre verbal and written responses from performers to explore how the interaction of and with these visual characteristics shapes performer responses to the score and resulting music.