Techniques for providing visual feedback to illustrate the effects of editing operations are provided. This visual feedback may be provided in the form of an animated image that visually represents the pre-operation data gradually "morphing" into the data as affected by an operation. The data may be digital signal data that represents a recording of sound, for example. In response to a user's activation of a particular editing operation that affects the data, a resulting visual representation is generated. The resulting visual representation represents the data in the post-operation state, after the effects of the particular editing operation have been applied to the data completely. However, before the resulting visual representation is displayed, intermediate, interpolated visual representations of the data are generated and displayed. Each intermediate visual representation may be displayed successively in the same area as the initial visual representation, one-at-a-time, drawing the user's attention to the operation's effects.