Many practices have been presented in music generation recently. While stylistic music generation using deep learning techniques has became the main stream, these models still struggle to generate music with high musicality, different levels of music structure, and controllability. In addition, more application scenarios such as music therapy require imitating more specific musical styles from a few

This paper has two different aims: presenting the problem of target-based computer-assisted orchestration and introducing a new computational framework to solve it, called Orchidea. After the definition of the static and the dynamic versions of the problem, a historic perspective will be discussed. The cultural context of assisted orchestration will be examined, with particular attention being given

Musical acoustics is a scientific field essential for an in-depth understanding of musical instruments and sounds. As such, it is relevant to wide audiences involved with music, including musicians, composers and even casual listeners. This work describes a twofold approach for introductory, hands-on education in musical acoustics. First, a concise classification approach for acoustic instruments is

ABSTRACT We explored how drummers express a ‘back-beat’ pattern with different timing styles (laid-back, on-beat, pushed) via stroke onset and intensity features. Based on hierarchical clustering analyses and phylogenetic trees, we found three main strategies: (1) ‘general earliness/lateness’, where most instruments are consistently played earlier/later in time relative to a metrical grid; (2) ‘early/late

This article discusses the use of sound sculptures as tunable modulators of the transmission characteristics of acoustic sources during performance. We propose IRIS, a sculpture consisting of a periodic composite formed by an acoustic double-fishnet made up of two discs with periodic perforations and independent rotation. From the analysis of the transmitted field and binaural impulse responses, we

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is an analytical technique commonly used across the natural sciences that works upon the detection of magnetically spin-aligned atomic nuclei resonating with an externally applied radio source. This work presents an overview of music created using NMR data and outlines principles for its use in composition. Methods for the sonification and musical interpretation

Digital musical instruments are frequently designed in research and experimental performance contexts but few are taken up into sustained use by active and professional musicians. To identify the needs of performers who use novel technologies in their practices, a survey of musicians was conducted that identified desirable qualities for instruments to be viable in active use, along with attributes

Present-day inquiries into aspects of 19th century performance style mark the growing quest to revive practices of post-1800 music repertoire. This paper aims to trace whether there be found an impact of recordings made by 19th century violinists of coeval repertoire on current performers who've recorded the same works. Early, intermediate, and present-day recordings (N = 81) of three late-romantic

Audiences, juries, and critics continually evaluate performers based on their interpretations of familiar classics. Yet formally assessing the perceptual consequences of interpretive decisions is challenging – particularly with respect to how they shape emotional messages. Here, we explore the issue through comparison of emotion ratings (using scales of arousal and valence) for excerpts of all 48 pieces

This paper uses corpus analysis to explore relationships between tone and melody in folk and contemporary songs in Chaozhou, a Chinese dialect with eight lexical tones and a wealth of tone sandhi. Results suggest that: (1) there is a high degree of correspondence between tone and melody in Chaozhou song; (2) tone sandhi influences tone-melody correspondence; (3) tones realised in context can be categorised

Many studies have presented computational models of musical structure, as an important aspect of musicological analysis. However, the use of grammar-based compressors to automatically recover such information is a relatively new and promising technique. We investigate their performance extensively using a collection of nearly 8000 scores, on tasks including error detection, classification, and segmentation

Violin bowing is a specialised sound-producing action, which may be affected by psychological performance techniques. In sport, attentional focus impacts motor performance, but limited evidence for this exists in music. We investigated the effects of attentional focus on acoustical, physiological, and physical parameters of violin bowing in experienced and novice violinists. Attentional focus significantly

This study aims to recognise emotions in music through the Adaptive-Network-Based Fuzzy (ANFIS). For this, we applied such structure in 877 MP3 files with thirty seconds duration each, collected directly on the YouTube platform, which represent the emotions anger, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. We developed four classification strategies, consisting of sets of five, four, three, and two emotions

ABSTRACT Making the link between human emotion and music is challenging. Our aim was to produce an efficient system that emotionally rates songs from multiple genres. To achieve this, we employed a series of online self-report studies, utilising Russell's circumplex model. The first study (n = 44) identified audio features that map to arousal and valence for 20 songs. From this, we constructed a set

Ensemble musicians engage with each other visually through glances and body motion. We conducted a case study to test how string quartet musicians would respond to playing conditions that were meant to discourage or promote visually communicative behaviour. A quartet performed in different seating configurations under rehearsal and concert conditions. Quantity of head motion was reduced when musicians'

The relationship between musicians and their musical instruments has influenced music engagement and musical structure across societies. In this work, we study how musicians react to changes in their instrument and the associations between keys and pitches using experiments that simulate the interface of the accordion. Seventeen accordionists, pianists and guitarists took part in the study. The results

The coherent organisation of thematic material into large-scale structures within a composition is an important concept in both traditional and cognitive theories of music. However, empirical evidence supporting their perception is scarce. Providing a more nuanced approach, this paper introduces a computational model of hypothesised cognitive mechanisms underlying perception of large-scale thematic

A previous study showed that ‘bright’ vowels (i.e. front vowels, which have higher second formants) are favoured for on-beat words in hip-hop music. Here we partially replicated these findings in a more diverse sample of pop songs from the Rolling Stone Corpus. Stressed monosyllables were classified by their vowel’s place of articulation and their metric position. Bright vowels were 9–13% more likely

This paper reports on an exploratory study in the field of electroacoustic music aimed at understanding whether a sensation similar to that associated with the concept of “cadence” in relation to tonal music can be identified when listening to sounds diffused in space. Using a variety of patterned stimuli in a perceptual experiment, we asked listeners to evaluate the completeness of multiple trajectories

ABSTRACT This special issue, arising from a symposium in Helsinki in 2019, presents contributions from a diverse group of practitioners, representing a broad range of approaches in the making, thinking and writing about digital musical instruments. The authors consider the socio-cultural role of technology in current and emerging digital music practices with changing social roles, historical and critical

Co-regulated timing in a music ensemble rests on the human capacity to coordinate actions in time. Here we explore the hypothesis that humans predict timing constancy in coordinated actions, in view of timing their own actions in line with the others. An algorithm (BListener) is presented that predicts timing constancy, using Bayesian inference about incoming timing data from the music ensemble. The

A thing becomes a musical instrument by virtue of its use in a social context, a use of which its initial intended design (if it had one) forms only a part: sometimes a very small part.Drawing on the notion of the ‘performance ecosystem’ this papersuggests that instrument designers/makers working with digital technologies might fruitfully attend further to the social contexts/constructs that characterise

The paper examines the sonic experiences of the listener in digital environments by using a Bluetooth speaker as an example. It discusses how the everyday use of a speaker highlights human beings’ material and multi-sensory situatedness in digital environments. Based on the analytical approaches concerning embodiment, movement, and infrastructures, the paper aims to develop further the idea of musicking

It is widely accepted that computational technologies shape the relationship of musicians, instrument builders and composers with music, affecting various socio-cultural realisms in music. In this article, I discuss in what ways music-making still emerges as a social construct, even as a result of the mutual cooperation with human musicians and AI-powered autonomous instruments. I argue that building

This paper will follow a musically experimental trajectory from non-mediated musical sound through many centuries of musical innovation from the simplest forms of resonation to today’s synthesised musics in electronic – digital and synthesiser musics – with side looks at how changes in musical technologies play roles in the player-instrument and listener-music relations. I shall then look briefly at

Music technologies reflect the most advanced human technologies in most historical periods. Examples range from 40 thousand years old bone flutes found in caves in the Swabian Jura, through ancient Greek water organs or medieval Arabic musical automata, to today’s electronic and digital instruments with deep learning. Music technologies incorporate the musical ideas of a time and place and they disseminate

This conversation between Thor Magnusson and Claudia Molitor introduces the idea of composition as cultural technology, where compositions are understood as systems that create spaces within which ‘things’ can occur and can be explored. In this conception of composition, the composer becomes the curator of an experience for an audience, shifting the focus of the work on the encounter of the audience

In this article, I will discuss listening to binaural recordings of Helsinki metro tunnels through the concepts of digital anthropology and naftology, the philosophy of the experience of oil. The digital is understood in this context as material culture and also as a constitutive part of corporeality. By conceptualising binaural recordings both as instrument and device for sensing the sonic environments

(2021). Correction. Journal of New Music Research: Vol. 50, Special Issue: Socio-Cultural Role of Technology in Digital Musical Instruments. Guest Editors: Koray Tahiroğlu and Thor Magnusson, pp. I-I.

This paper studies swarms of autonomous musical robots and its contributions are twofold. First, I introduce Dr. Squiggles, a simple rhythmic musical robot, which serves as a general platform for studying human-robot and robot-robot musical interaction. Secondly, I use three Dr. Squiggles robots to study what happens when musical robots listen to, learn from, and respond to one another while improvising

The automatic recognition of scanned Medieval manuscripts written in square notation still represents a challenge due to degradation, non-standard layouts, or notations. We propose to apply CNN/LSTM networks that are trained using the segmentation-free CTC-loss-function. For evaluation, we use three different manuscripts and achieve a diplomatic Symbol Accuracy Rate (dSAR) of 86.0% on the most difficult

The task of automatic melody harmonization aims to build a model that generates a chord sequence as the harmonic accompaniment of a given multiple-bar melody sequence. In this paper, we present a comparative study evaluating the performance of canonical approaches to this task, including template matching, hidden Markov model, genetic algorithm and deep learning. The evaluation is conducted on a dataset

This paper details a corpus study examining Renaissance voice-leading practices. Palestrina’s masses are searched for progressions matching contrapuntal ‘rules’ taken from Vicentino (1555 Vicentino, N. (1555). L’Antica Musica Ridotta alla Moderna Prattica. A. Barre. Facs; Bärenreiter, 1959. [Google Scholar]). Vicentino’s treatise provides a quasi-systematic organization of contrapuntal rules according

An interesting aspect of Indian art music is the prominent place of improvisation in performance. We explore the influence of the structural constraints of the genre on raga motifs in the course of improvisation. Audio recordings of North Indian vocal concerts are analysed to extract measurements of the defining parameters of the recurrent melodic phrases that characterise the raga in performance.

This paper studies the music from the sixteenth century Coimbra manuscripts using both traditional musicological approaches and techniques based on statistical analysis and machine learning. A particular focus is placed on gaining insights into the origins of the anonymous and doubtfully attributed mass movements, looked at through the lens of potential stylistic differences between the Iberian and

We aim to increase user engagement in unfamiliar music. We investigated listening duration for 100 unfamiliar art music items from the Australian Music Centre (AMC) library, presented under four different exposure conditions: a continuous affect response task, text/photographic information, text only, and no information. Participants could skip each item, and provided post-excerpt liking or familiarity

In a representative historical database of musical scores, a sonority was defined at every onset in any voice. For eight trichords—major (047), minor (037), suspended (027), diminished (036), 015, 045, 025, 035—immediately preceding and following sonorities were analysed. Chroma prevalence profiles depended surprisingly little on century or temporal position—especially for major/minor trichords (cf

Whether piano touch can influence piano timbre or not is a highly contested topic between acousticians and musicians. To gain insight into the ways in which pianists understand and use timbre, eight piano students were interviewed about their conceptualisation of timbre and ways of producing different timbres on the piano. Results indicate that pianists interpret timbre holistically as the overall

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For centuries, the history and music of Joseph Franz Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart have been compared by scholars. Recently, the growing field of music information retrieval (MIR) has offered quantitative analyses to complement traditional qualitative analyses of these composers. In this MIR study, we classify the composer of Haydn and Mozart string quartets based on the content of their scores

This paper introduces a method for computing the time-varying convolution in parallel. It discusses the motivations for this approach, detailing the limitations with the current serial implementation. A detailed review of the signal processing involved is presented, describing the time-varying filter as a modification of the time-invariant case. This is followed by description of the parallel method

This paper reports on the design and evaluation of drum rhythm spaces as interactive bi-dimensional maps used for the visualisation, retrieval and generation of drum patterns. We carry out two experiments exploring human processing of polyphonic drum patterns concluding with a list of descriptors that significantly influence similarity sensations. These features are used to build spaces based on drum

This corpus study constitutes the first quantitative style analysis of Choro, a primarily instrumental music genre that emerged in Brazil at the end of the 19th century. We evaluate its description in a recent comprehensive textbook by transcribing the chord symbols and formal structure of the 295 representative pieces in the Choro Songbook. Our approach uncovers central stylistic traits of this musical

Music instrument playing technique classification based on raw audio is a relatively unexplored area of music information retrieval research. This study systematically investigates the use of traditional audio features augmented by features based on the Hartley transform, used as input to a multiclass support vector machine (SVM) classifier, to identify up to 11 different playing techniques performed

In an online study, N = 517 participants rated 48 very short musical stimuli comprised of well-known pop songs with regard to arrangement parameters and cross-modal variables. Identification rates for songs and artists ranged between 0-7%. We observed associations between increasing stimulus durations as well as structural sections (chorus or verse) and detection rates. Analyses of the cross-modal

Body Mapping is becoming increasingly popular among musicians as an educational approach to improve bodily movement and thereby the audible quality of music performances. This study used MIDI data to quantitatively measure changes in scale and arpeggio piano performance one day before and one day after a Body Mapping workshop. While there were subtle changes in the MIDI data, these changes were generally

Vibrato is one of the most common musical techniques used for the enrichment of vocal and musical instrument sounds. We propose a method that can analyse the intonation, vibrato rate, and vibrato extent of a vibrato tone as a function of time, which is based on the discrete Fourier transform of its fundamental frequency trajectory. According to experimental results, the proposed method is robust to

Many researchers have noted inconsistencies between descriptions and effects of nominally sad music. The current study addresses whether traditional music-related sadness can be broken down into more than one category. Melancholic and grieving musical passages were collected in three stages. Participants with superior aural skills rated 18 structural parameters of these musical passages on 7-point

We describe the development of a computational model predicting listener-perceived expressions of music in branding contexts. Representative ground truth from multi-national online listening experiments was combined with machine learning of music branding expert knowledge, and audio signal analysis toolbox outputs. A mixture of random forest and traditional regression models is able to predict average

Previous studies have revealed uneven duration patterns at the sixteenth note level of samba. In the present study, we investigated the influence of tempo on such sixteenth-note patterns in a performed samba groove.The results revealed an uneven duration pattern in all tempi. Interestingly, the shortest note becomes relatively shorter and the longest relatively longer as the tempo increases. We suggest

In this article we provide approaches to translating into modern music notation Znamenny Russian Church chants, written in neumatic (“znamenny” or “hook”) notation. Neumes are sequences of notes of varying lengths, that correspond to singing one syllable of old Slavonic verse. Starting in 17th century, neumes were supplemented with pomjeta facilitating mapping into modern music notation. Manuscripts

Electronic dance music (EDM) is a genre where thousands of new songs are released every week. The list of EDM subgenres considered is long, but it also evolves according to trends and musical tastes. With this in view, we have retrieved two sets of over 2000 songs separated by more than a year. Songs belong to the top 100 list of an EDM website taxonomy of more than 20 subgenres that changed in the

The normalised pairwise variability index (nPVI), has been frequently used to measure the rhythmic variance between musical onsets. For example, researchers have proposed connections between the nationalities of composers and the nPVI values of their music and native language. One particular issue, however, lies in the notion of intended nationality – composers frequently wrote in national styles other

This study examines the perception of tetrachords. Musicians were divided into four groups. One group heard a Bartók composition predominated by [0167]; other groups heard it recomposed with any instance of [0167] replaced with [0148], [0268], or [0257]. Analysis of ratings before and after familiarisation suggests that participants recognized the tetrachord from familiarisation, no matter which set-class

This paper introduces MIq (Multi-Agent Interactive qgMuse), which builds on the single agent quantum system qgMuse using teleportation. MIq is the first attempt at a real-time interactive quantum computer music algorithm that utilises the quantum advantage. Previous interactive or real-time quantum music algorithms running on quantum computers have been mappings of classical computing algorithms, with

The term ‘post-tonal’ embodies a broad distinction between musical explorations of new combinations of tones (‘post-tonality’) and explorations of sonic resources other than tones (‘post-tone’). A significant turning-point in post-tone thinking occurred when some composers replaced notes with masses of notes, or sound masses, as musical units. Existing definitions of sound mass are reviewed and a new

ABSTRACT We present a study and reflection about the role and use of smartphone technology for a large-scale musical performance involving audience participation. We evaluated a full design and development process from initial ideation to a final performance concept. We found that the smartphone became the design tool, the technical device and the musical instrument at the same time. As a technical

ABSTRACT Querying music is still a disembodied process in Music Information Retrieval. Thus, the goal of the presented study was to explore how free and spontaneous movement captured by smartphone accelerometer data can be related to musical properties. Motion features related to tempo, smoothness, size, and regularity were extracted and shown to predict the musical qualities ‘rhythmicity’ (R² = .45)

ABSTRACT Harmonic transcriptions by ear rely heavily on subjective perceptions, which can lead to disagreement between annotators. The current computational metrics employed to measure annotator disagreement are useful for determining similarity on a pitch-class level, but are agnostic to the functional properties of chords. In contrast, music theories like Hugo Riemann's theory of ‘harmonic function’

ABSTRACT This study aimed to investigate the differences in verbal descriptions of emotions induced by music between adults who are visually impaired (VI) and adults who have normal vision (NV). Thirty participants (15 VI, 15 NV) listened to music excerpts and were interviewed. A content analysis and a syntactic analysis were performed. Among the VI group, contextual verbalism was more highly observed