Regular expressions as violin bowing patterns

String players spend a significant amount of practice time creating and learning bowings. These may be indicated in the music using up-bow and down-bow symbols, but those traditional notations do not capture the complex bowing patterns that are latent within the music. Regular expressions, a mathematical notation for a simple class of formal languages, can describe precisely the bowing patterns that commonly arise in string music. A software tool based on regular expressions enables performers to search for passages that can be handled with similar bowings, and to edit them consistently. A computer-based music editor incorporating bowing patterns has been implemented, using Lilypond to typeset the music. Our approach has been evaluated by using the editor to study ten movements from six violin sonatas by W. A. Mozart. Our experience shows that the editor is successful at finding passages and inserting bowings; that relatively complex patterns occur a number of times; and that the bowings can be inserted automatically and consistently

Music identification by Leadsheets

Most experimental research on content-based automatic recognition and identification of musical documents is founded on statistical distribution of timbre or simple retrieval mechanisms like comparison of melodic segments. Therefore often a vast number of relevant and irrelevant hits including multiple appearances of the same documents are returned or the actual document can’t be revealed at all. To improve this situation we propose a model for recognition of music that enables identification and comparison of musical documents without dependence on their actual instantiation. The resulting structures enclose musical meaning and can be used for estimation of identity and semantic relationship between musical documents

Geometric algorithms for transposition invariant content-based music retrieval

We are grateful to Mika Turkia for the implementations.Peer reviewe

Transposition invariant pattern matching for multi-track strings

Peer reviewe

A Similarity Matrix for Irish Traditional Dance Music

It is estimated that there are between seven and ten thousand Irish traditional dance tunes in existence. As Irish musicians travelled the world they carried their repertoire in their memories and rarely recorded these pieces in writing. When the music was passed down from generation to generation by ear the names of these pieces of music and the melodies themselves were forgotten or changed over time. This has led to problems for musicians and archivists when identifying the names of traditional Irish tunes. Almost all of this music is now available in ABC notation from online collections. An ABC file is a text file containing a transcription of one or more melodies, the tune title, musical key, time signature and other relevant details. The principal aim of this project is to define a process by which Irish music can be compared using string distance algorithms. An online survey will then be conducted to assess if human participants agree with the computer comparisons. Improvements will then be made to the string distance algorithms by considering music theory. Two other methods of assessing musical similarity, Breandán Breathnach‟s Melodic Indexing System and Parsons Code will be computerised and integrated into a Combined Ranking System (CRS). An hypothesis will be formed based on the results and experiences of creating this system. This hypothesis will be tested on humans and if successful, used to achieve the final aim of the project, to construct a similarity matrix