ABOUT
Dvořák Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” Visual Listening Guide, as it appeared in a program book of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
The Visual Listening Guide
The Visual Listening Guide is a new way to discover a symphonic work in a visually engaging and comprehensible manner, regardless of musical background. Created by musicologist Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley, the Guide’s distinctive blend of graphics, colour, and text aims to help structure listening—and thus deepen understanding—of the music.
The unique design of the Visual Listening Guide aims to show the structure of a symphonic work, so you can know how to listen to it. It acts as a kind of map to the piece, indicating important sonic landmarks and other features; therefore, it’s not a comprehensive representation of the musical score. Rather, the Guide provides a “big picture” view of the work’s form, by showing when the main musical themes and motives first appear, are developed, and recur within a movement and/or the entire symphonic work, thereby helping to navigate listening.
Since its introduction in 2015, the award-winning Visual Listening Guide has acquired a strong international following, and is a proven success with music listeners of a broad range of ages and experiences with orchestral music. Hundreds of thousands have used and enjoyed the Guides—in print through concert programs, and now available as individual publications online—in 22 countries worldwide.
For more information about the Visual Listening Guide, see HERE and HERE.
Also, Hannah’s chapter on the Visual Listening Guide in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory is now available online.
Examples of the Visual Listening Guide
How to Purchase
For personal use
Digital PDF versions of Visual Listening Guides for personal use and study can be purchased from the SHOP. Guides can be used with any audio or video recording.
For educators and organizations: licensing and commissions
Visual Listening Guides can be licensed by educators and organizations for instructional use and publication. Commissions for new Visual Listening Guides are also welcome. Please visit HERE for more information.
Organizations who have licensed and/or commissioned Visual Listening Guides include:
Shortlisted for the Classical:NEXT 2017 Innovation Award
Winner of the 2016 KANTAR Information Is Beautiful Bronze Community Award based on public vote
Praise for the Visual Listening Guide:
“A valuable tool to non-musicians who want to learn more about classical music but who have limited means to understand more complex guides. It’s also a great teaching aid for young music students about the shape and structure of classical masterpieces.”
“A deft mix of text and graphics, the guides can be read while listening to the performance, their layout visualising the thematic progression of the music, indicating the keys in use, what instruments feature and, using morse code-like notation, their duration.”
“I thought this whole concept [of the Visual Listening Guides] was brilliant and really achieves information design’s primary purpose—bringing clarity and engagement to a complex situation.”
Hannah Chan-Hartley
Creator of the Visual Listening Guide
BMus (Honours Violin Performance; McGill University), MPhil (Musicology & Performance; University of Oxford), PhD (Musicology; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Dr. Hannah Chan-Hartley is a musicologist, active as a writer, program book editor, content producer, instructor, speaker, and researcher with various organizations, including Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa, Detroit Opera, and the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. In July 2023, she returned to the Verbier Festival as Musicologist-in-Residence at the invitation of the Festival’s creative lab UNLTD and the Verbier Festival Academy, where, in addition to giving preconcert talks with the Visual Listening Guide, presented the world debut of the Augmented Reality Visual Listening Guide. This was a role she also had in 2018 and 2022 when she presented the Visual Listening Guide in talks and workshops with festival goers and Academy students. She was previously Managing Editor and Musicologist at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Toronto, Canada. It was in this role that she initially developed her Visual Listening Guides, which were first published in the TSO’s program books. Since then, the Guides have garnered international interest and acclaim, and have been featured, to date, in the program books of orchestras in Canada, Australia, Finland, Singapore, the UK, and the USA. She wrote about the Visual Listening Guide for a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory (Oxford University Press, 2022), edited by J. Daniel Jenkins.
Hannah has performed professionally as an orchestral violinist and loves to play chamber music. She continues to pursue her research interests in the social and cultural history of music and music institutions, focusing on the Europe-North America transatlantic context from the 19th century to the present day, as well as the performance and reception history of orchestral music and opera.