Discuss “Freud in the bedroom and fleshy-colored nouns”

Dozens of blue semicircles of varying sizes meander across a horizontal axis, some repeating in a uniformly-sized arc again and again, while others hop along at random intervals and at random sizes. This, Martin Wattenberg asserts, is the shape of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” The arcs connect repeating sections of the musical score to convey the overall structure, or shape, of the song. Wattenberg displays the shapes of several songs, from the folk song “Clementine” to John Coltrane.

Wattenberg’s investigation into the shape of song is part of his overall mission to make the invisible visible. He explained the thought processes and engineering behind some of his most interesting projects in his lecture “Revelatory Interfaces,”...