I just returned from my first ever Music Librarians Association Conference - 4 days of very interesting conversation about the newly published Tone Perception Visualized: Mozart's G Minor Piano Quartet. To my surprise many are already deeply committed to visualizations of various sorts, many seemed open to the notion of a graphic presentation of a musical work, and many were generous in their response to my invitation to try it themselves.
Asked to visualize even primitively the opening phrase of My Country, 'Tis of Thee produced a splendid variety of shapes and colors, exactly the sort of thing I recommend in learning to orient to the text.
There were those, of course, who couldn't get themselves to abandon the idea of sound being discrete as the symbols we us to represent it are discrete.
