Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1

An Empirical Method for Comparing Pitch Patterns in Spoken and Musical Melodies: A Comment on J.G.S. Pearl's "Eavesdropping with a Master: Leos Janáček and the Music of Speech."

Music and speech both feature structured melodic patterns, yet these patterns are rarely compared using empirical methods. One reason for this has been a lack of tools which allow quantitative comparisons of spoken and musical pitch sequences. Recently, a new model of speech intonation perception has been proposed based on principles of pitch perception in speech. The “prosogram” model converts a sentence's fundamental frequency contour into a sequence of discrete tones and glides. This sequence is meant to represent a listener's perception of pitch in connected speech. This article briefly describes the prosogram and suggests a few ways in which it can be used to compare the structure of spoken and musical melodies

Eavesdropping with a Master: Leoš Janáček and the Music of Speech

The composer Leos Janácek (1854-1928) has been noted for his interest in speech melodies. Little discussion has focused however on the field methods that he used in gathering them, nor on the products themselves. Janácek spent more than three decades, transcribing thousands of what he termed nápevky mluvy [tunelets of speech] in standard musical notation. The record that remains of these efforts is impressive both for its volume and its quality, as well as for its potential to reveal aspects of the perceptual overlap between music and language. Heretofore his pioneering efforts in the study of speech prosody and music perception have neither been recognized nor acknowledged. The present study provides a background for and an overview of the transcriptions, along with comparative musicological and linguistic analyses of the materials presented. With this analysis as a starting point, I indicate promising avenues for further collaborations between linguists and musicologists, seeking an integrated theory of music and language cognition