  In this paper, we bridge the gap between visualization and musicology by
focusing on rhythm analysis tasks, which are tedious due to the complex visual
encoding of the well-established Common Music Notation (CMN). Instead of
replacing the CMN, we augment sheet music with rhythmic fingerprints to
mitigate the complexity originating from the simultaneous encoding of musical
features. The proposed visual design exploits music theory concepts such as the
rhythm tree to facilitate the understanding of rhythmic information.
Juxtaposing sheet music and the rhythmic fingerprints maintains the connection
to the familiar representation. To investigate the usefulness of the rhythmic
fingerprint design for identifying and comparing rhythmic patterns, we
conducted a controlled user study with four experts and four novices. The
results show that the rhythmic fingerprints enable novice users to recognize
rhythmic patterns that only experts can identify using non-augmented sheet
music.
