Visualizing Shostakovich: How the DSCH motif appears throughout his Tenth Symphony

Written as part of my final project for the wonderful class FRSEMR 63C: The Symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich taught by Professor Shreffler.

This project aims to explore the use of Dimitri Shostakovich's autobiographical DSCH motif in his Tenth Symphony, primarily in the third movement. To do so, I use audio tools to retrieve appearances of this motif from sound recordings, and data analysis tools to visualize and examine its use through the symphony. Using these visualizations, I also attempt to provide an interpretation of the third and fourth movements as a whole, which can be read about further in the final paper.

Libraries Used

• Librosa for audio processing
• NumPy for general data manipulation, and some data analysis
• Matplotlib for all the visualizations