Hit Song Science (HSS) is an emerging topic that aims to unveil the success dynamics within the music industry. Considering the growth of the area, we provide a comprehensive study with a complete ...

This paper examines how listeners hear contemporary art music practices such as post-spectralism, glitch-electronica, contemporary classical and electroacoustic music. The sound configurations of t...

In this article, we develop a hypothesis on the role of spectral entropy in conveying a sensation of termination for short musical fragments. We tested the hypothesis in an experiment presenting sp...

We present computational analyses of musical performances during 12-months study by novice participants aged 65–80. They learned two instruments (an electronic piano keyboard; the iPad app ThumbJam...

Tabla is a North Indian percussion instrument that serves as both an accompaniment and a captivating solo instrument. Tabla solo is intricate and elaborate, exhibiting rhythmic evolution through a ...

The automatic transcription for non-Western music presents unique challenges, particularly because the result is often imperfect. How to improve automatic music transcription (AMT) for computationa...

This paper redefines the performance practice of street barrel organs by transcending their conventional physical gestures beyond their role as mere music reproduction machines. We propose a new understanding of these instruments by establishing a parallel with how turntables started to be considered musical instruments through hand manipulation. Collaborating with Chilean organilleros, we experimented

The concept of rāga in Carnatic music is based on an ordered set of notes in an octave. Historically rāgas are broadly classified into two sets, namely Janaka (root/parent) and Janya (derived/offspring) rāgas. Every janya rāga is derived from a unique parent. We examine this classification critically and attempt to provide a quantitative basis for such a classification by defining a ‘distance’ between

The concept of shad-makam is explored through an analysis of pieces in makams Rengidil and Ruhnevaz, to see whether these two are distinct structures or transposition of their antecedents; Neveser and Buselik. The analysis was performed using ML algorithms on features extracted from symbolic Turkish music data. The standard tuning and the shad-makam pieces transposed to the same pitch with original

Published in Journal of New Music Research (Vol. 51, No. 2-3, 2022)

Several studies have found increases in syncopation within genres of twentieth-century popular music, but its evolution across the entire century has not been explored. In this study we use a new corpus of vocal melodies to examine trends in the use of syncopation. We find an increasing trend over the entire century. We also consider three ways of categorising syncopations into ‘strong’ and ‘weak’

FluidHarmony is an algorithmic method for defining a hierarchical harmonic lexicon in equal temperaments. It utilizes an enharmonic weighted Fourier transform space to represent pitch class set (pcsets) relations. The method ranks pcsets based on user-defined constraints: the importance of interval classes (ICs) and a reference pcset. Evaluation of 5,184 Western musical pieces from the 16th to 20th

Published in Journal of New Music Research (Vol. 51, No. 1, 2022)

In Mali, the introduction of 3G alongside growing access to digital audio technologies throughout the 2010s has led a sharp increase in the number of recording studios. Using an ethnography of Bamako studios, we establish a theoretical framework and a methodology to remap music production studies beyond the limits of a Northerncentric narrative. We discuss the notions of high, low and alt tech, and

Material sound effects are widely used in virtual reality and games to convey specific material sensations to the audience and improve the immersion experience. However, systematic research on parametrically controlling the material sensations evoked by sound effects is lacking. This study presents a new method of sound design regarding the control of parameters – pitch, waveform, attenuation time

Study of musical improvisation has proven a significantly worthwhile topic of psychological and musicological research. This qualitative study asked: How do musicians experience sense of agency and state of mind while freely improvising? Twenty-four experts in free form music (Morris, 2012. Perpetual frontier: The properties of free music. Riti) performed short free improvisations that were explored

While music listening on mobile phones can serve many affect-regulatory goals, success in reaching these goals is yet to be empirically assessed. This study aimed to determine how frequently listeners successfully reach their affect-regulatory goals, and the predictors of this success. Data were collected using the experience sampling app MuPsych, from 293 Finnish participants. Goals were successfully

This text describes the musical evaluation of a hybrid music notation system that combines traditional notation with symbols and concepts from spectromorphological analysis. During three academic years from 2017 to 2020, three groups of composition students learned to work with sound notation, recreating and interpreting short electroacoustic music sketches based solely on their notation transcriptions

This paper proposes a new morphing method to generate a melody, given two melodies represented by time-span trees obtained from the generative theory of tonal music (GTTM). In this paper, we define a feature structure based on a time-span tree and the distance between two structures. Next, we construct a lattice of subsumption relations among these structures and define three algebraic operations:

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

Titanium additive manufacturing (Ti-AM) is currently used for customized parts in medicine, aviation, and aerospace. The combination of superior mechanical and physical properties of titanium alloy...

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