Third International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation TENOR 2017

The third International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation seeks to focus on a set of specific research issues associated with Music Notation that were elaborated at the first two editions of TENOR in Paris and Cambridge. The theme of the conference is vocal music, whereas the pre-conference workshops focus on innovative technological approaches to music notation

Exploring complex rhythmic devices in new music composition through software design

This thesis examines the role that complex rhythms perform in my music. I will demonstrate how the software I have created is unique and necessary for this type of rhythmic exploration in music composition and how it differs from existing softwares. I will investigate the practice of hearing one’s environment as music and how the development of my software and compositions are integrally linked to this phenomenon and make clear the importance of advanced rhythmic study within this practice. I am particularly interested in extending my own and others’ perceptual capabilities to hear more and more complex rhythms accurately and congruently with what they would normally consider ‘groove’. To this end, my project involves the development of softwares that: mathematically model the naturally occurring rhythms of specific species of frogs; allow the simultaneous occurrence of ninety-six different tempos; explore Miles Okazaki’s Rhythm Matrix; enable the creation of new and complex grooves from simple beginnings via performance means; allow for infinitely complex variable mapping of musical parameters and rhythms via simple gestural controls; are completely modular and dynamic in design, thereby freeing the user from normal software design limitations. I will demonstrate the use of these softwares in my music compositions and analyse the compositions from within the context of rhythmic exploration and discovery. KEYWORDS: composition, computer music, software, polyrhythm, algorithmic, experimental, groove, tempo, beat, poly-tempi, nature, frog

CLiFF Notes: Research In Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania

CLIFF is the Computational Linguists\u27 Feedback Forum. We are a group of students and faculty who gather once a week to hear a presentation and discuss work currently in progress. The \u27feedback\u27 in the group\u27s name is important: we are interested in sharing ideas, in discussing ongoing research, and in bringing together work done by the students and faculty in Computer Science and other departments. However, there are only so many presentations which we can have in a year. We felt that it would be beneficial to have a report which would have, in one place, short descriptions of the work in Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania. This report then, is a collection of abstracts from both faculty and graduate students, in Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics. We want to stress the close ties between these groups, as one of the things that we pride ourselves on here at Penn is the communication among different departments and the inter-departmental work. Rather than try to summarize the varied work currently underway at Penn, we suggest reading the abstracts to see how the students and faculty themselves describe their work. The report illustrates the diversity of interests among the researchers here, as well as explaining the areas of common interest. In addition, since it was our intent to put together a document that would be useful both inside and outside of the university, we hope that this report will explain to everyone some of what we are about

The Role of Slow Speech Amplitude Envelope for Speech Processing and Reading Development

Published: 31 August 2017This study examined the putative link between the entrainment to the slow rhythmic structure of speech, speech intelligibility and reading by means of a behavioral paradigm. Two groups of 20 children (Grades 2 and 5) were asked to recall a pseudoword embedded in sentences presented either in quiet or noisy listening conditions. Half of the sentences were primed with their syllabic and prosodic amplitude envelope to determine whether a boost in auditory entrainment to these speech features enhanced pseudoword intelligibility. Priming improved pseudoword recall performance only for the older children both in a quiet and a noisy listening environment, and such benefit from the prime correlated with reading skills and pseudoword recall. Our results support the role of syllabic and prosodic tracking of speech in reading development.This work was supported by the Severo Ochoa program grant [SEV-2015-049]; MaL was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness [PSI2015-65338-P]

The impact of animacy and speech rhythm on the word order of conjuncts in German preschoolers and adults

In this study, we investigated the impact of two constraints on the linear order of constituents in German preschool children’s and adults’ speech production: a rhythmic (*LAPSE, militating against sequences of unstressed syllables) and a semantic one (ANIM, requiring animate referents to be named before inanimate ones). Participants were asked to produce coordinated bare noun phrases in response to picture stimuli (e.g., Delfin und Planet, ‘dolphin and planet’) without any predefined word order. Overall, children and adults preferably produced animate items before inanimate ones, confirming findings of Prat-Sala, Shillcock, and Sorace (2000). In the group of preschoolers, the strength of the animacy effect correlated positively with age. Furthermore, the order of the conjuncts was affected by the rhythmic constraint, such that disrhythmic sequences, i.e., stress lapses, were avoided. In both groups, the latter result was significant when the two stimulus pictures did not vary with respect to animacy. In sum, our findings suggest a stronger influence of animacy compared to rhythmic well-formedness on conjunct ordering for German speaking children and adults, in line with findings by McDonald, Bock, and Kelly (1993) who investigated English speaking adults

CLiFF Notes: Research In Natural Language Processing at the University of Pennsylvania

The Computational Linguistics Feedback Forum (CLIFF) is a group of students and faculty who gather once a week to discuss the members\u27 current research. As the word feedback suggests, the group\u27s purpose is the sharing of ideas. The group also promotes interdisciplinary contacts between researchers who share an interest in Cognitive Science. There is no single theme describing the research in Natural Language Processing at Penn. There is work done in CCG, Tree adjoining grammars, intonation, statistical methods, plan inference, instruction understanding, incremental interpretation, language acquisition, syntactic parsing, causal reasoning, free word order languages, ... and many other areas. With this in mind, rather than trying to summarize the varied work currently underway here at Penn, we suggest reading the following abstracts to see how the students and faculty themselves describe their work. Their abstracts illustrate the diversity of interests among the researchers, explain the areas of common interest, and describe some very interesting work in Cognitive Science. This report is a collection of abstracts from both faculty and graduate students in Computer Science, Psychology and Linguistics. We pride ourselves on the close working relations between these groups, as we believe that the communication among the different departments and the ongoing inter-departmental research not only improves the quality of our work, but makes much of that work possible

A Parse-based Framework for Coupled Rhythm Quantization and Score Structuring

International audienceWe present a formal language-based framework for MIDI-to-score transcription, the problem of converting a sequence of symbolic musical events with arbitrary timestamps into a structured music score. The framework aims at solving in one pass the two subproblems of rhythm quantization and score production. It relies, throughout the process, on an apriori hierarchical model of scores given by generative grammars. We show that this coupled approach helps to make relevant and interrelated decisions, and we present an algorithm computing transcription solutions optimal with respect to both the fitness of the quantization to the input, and a measure of complexity of music notation

Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, 15-17 June, 2016

The Folk Music Analysis Workshop brings together computational music analysis and ethnomusicology. Both symbolic and audio representations of music are considered, with a broad range of scientific approaches being applied (signal processing, graph theory, deep learning). The workshop features a range of interesting talks from international researchers in areas such as Indian classical music, Iranian singing, Ottoman-Turkish Makam music scores, Flamenco singing, Irish traditional music, Georgian traditional music and Dutch folk songs. Invited guest speakers were Anja Volk, Utrecht University and Peter Browne, Technological University Dublin