PPM-Decay: A computational model of auditory prediction with memory decay

Statistical learning and probabilistic prediction are fundamental processes in auditory cognition. A prominent computational model of these processes is Prediction by Partial Matching (PPM), a variable-order Markov model that learns by internalizing n-grams from training sequences. However, PPM has limitations as a cognitive model: in particular, it has a perfect memory that weights all historic observations equally, which is inconsistent with memory capacity constraints and recency effects observed in human cognition. We address these limitations with PPM-Decay, a new variant of PPM that introduces a customizable memory decay kernel. In three studies—one with artificially generated sequences, one with chord sequences from Western music, and one with new behavioral data from an auditory pattern detection experiment—we show how this decay kernel improves the model’s predictive performance for sequences whose underlying statistics change over time, and enables the model to capture effects of memory constraints on auditory pattern detection. The resulting model is available in our new open-source R package, ppm (https://github.com/pmcharrison/ppm)

Adaptive music: Automated music composition and distribution

Creativity, or the ability to produce new useful ideas, is commonly associated to the human being; but there are many other examples in nature where this phenomenon can be observed. Inspired by this fact, in engineering, and particularly in computational sciences, many different models have been developed to tackle a number of problems. Music, a form of art broadly present along the human history, is the main field addressed in this thesis, taking advantage of the kind of ideas that bring diversity and creativity to nature and computation. We present Melomics, an algorithmic composition method based on evolutionary search, with a genetic encoding of the solutions, which are interpreted in a complex developmental process that leads to music in the standard formats. This bioinspired compositional system has exhibited a high creative power and versatility to produce music of different type, which in many occasions has proven to be indistinguishable from the music made by human composers. The system also has enabled the emergence of a set of completely novel applications: from effective tools to help anyone to easily obtain the precise music they need, to radically new uses like adaptive music for therapy, amusement or many other purposes. It is clear to us that there is much research work yet to do in this field; and that countless and new unimaginable uses will derive from it

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

Form and Dialectical Opposition in Elliott Carter’s Compositional Aesthetic

In his many writings and interviews, Elliott Carter frequently stresses the connection between human experiences of opposition and conflict and the opposition he composes into his musical interactions. While these concepts have received much attention in the scholarly literature over the decades, in this dissertation I examine the role of opposition in Carter’s music by bringing Carter’s aesthetic into contact with an Adornian tradition of dialectical aesthetics, something new to Carter scholarship. In particular, I harness Adorno’s concept of the social mediation of music materials to shed light on Carter’s linking of the musical and the human in his highly abstracted music. Central to this mediation is the way materials respond immanently to social conditions. I show how Carter conceives of musical form and temporality in terms closely aligned to Adorno, particularly with respect to non-repetition and freedom of formal design. However, I also argue that the way in which Carter worked with his musical materials did not remain static but responded to a changing modernism around the turn of the twenty-first century. Through an analysis of two of Carter’s late-late orchestral compositions, I examine how the notion of dialectical opposition finds expression in sonic images of lightness, effervescence and human fragility rather than the explosive oppositions of Carter’s middle period music. Part 1 of the thesis identifies traces of dialectical thinking in Carter’s writings and interviews and interprets these through an Adornian lens. Part 2 presents technical analyses of both the Boston Concerto (2002) and the ASKO Concerto (2000), focusing on how the repetition built in to the ritornello form of both pieces is re- formed by way of Carter’s dialectical handling of form and content. Part 3 offers a ‘second reflection’ in which philosophical concepts in Part 1 and technical concepts in Part 2 are drawn together into a critical analysis of how both materials and composer are mediated by the social

Phenomenon and Abstraction: Coordinating Concepts in Music Theory and Analysis

This dissertation explores the habits of thought that inform how music analysts conceptualize the music they study and how this conceptualization affects the kinds of claims they make and the discursive practices adopted to express them. I aim to clarify these issues in music-theoretical conceptualization with an eye toward mediating analytical disagreements by tracing the influence of two types of concepts used in contemporary music analysis. I differentiate what I call theoretical concepts, which refer to abstract, theoretical objects, from phenomenal concepts, which refer to elements of felt, musical experience. Drawing on theories of concepts from philosophy of mind, I argue that these concepts have a complex structure, featuring both a reference and mode of presentation. The musical concept Dominant, for instance, might be used as a phenomenal concept, referring to the conscious experience of hearing a dominant, or it might be used as a theoretical concept, referring to a kind of abstract object, presented as either the triad the leads to the tonic or the triad built on scale degree five. In analysis, the kinds of concepts that analysts use will determine the scope of their analyses as well as define what sorts of critiques are best deployed against them. I explore four different ways that these conceptual types are used. These case studies include conceptually simple theories that attempt to foreground one type of concept or another (from the formalized model proffered by Eugene Narmour, to the drawing-analyses of Elaine Barkin) as well as more common analytical strategies that rely on both kinds of concept in concert, such as Schenkerian analysis and transformational and neo-Riemannian theory. I enrich my study of analytical approaches with insights drawn from my own analytical practice, including a wide range of styles and composers (though foregrounding the complexity of tonal analysis especially) and close readings of various authors in different analytical traditions. In general, I am concerned less with testing the soundness of any given approach than with understanding what ways of conceptualizing music underlie them and how analysts coordinate these concepts in practice. I find that while most approaches rely on both types of concept in some combination, their differences come in the roles these concepts play in analytical methodology and the degree to which each type of engagement is foregrounded in practice

Re-Assessing Rachmaninoff\u27s Legacy: The Piano Concertos and Evolution of His Musical Style

This thesis explores the evolution of Sergey Rachmaninoff’s five major piano/orchestral works and their revisions, which span most of his career. Composing at the turn of the twentieth century, which was marked by several revolutions, two world wars and changes in musical tastes from romanticism to modernism, Rachmaninoff was often referred to as a ‘conservative’ composer. However, contrary to this categorisation, throughout his musical life he developed a style that has become unique and revolutionary in its own right. This thesis aims to unravel the key arguments at the heart of the conservative-progressive debate and shed new light on Rachmaninoff’s legacy. To show the development of his writing style and introduction of progressive and novel elements, the thesis offers a comprehensive framework of analysis, situating Rachmaninoff’s works within the context of the continuing evolution of the Romantic piano concerto. It takes Piano Concerto No. 1, written in a traditional romantic form, as a starting point, and analyses the subsequent piano/orchestral works through internal comparison (within and between the piano concertos and their revisions), while also offering external comparisons where necessary. This approach helps trace the transformation of Rachmaninoff’s writing style and goes beyond the argument of similarities and differences between romanticism and modernism. To understand, compare and reveal the hidden nuances of Rachmaninoff’s compositional language, this thesis combines the analysis with a systematic application of charts and tables for all five works. The chronological and comparative analysis as well as a technical and harmonic assessment of the revisions of his concertos shed an extra light on the composer’s legacy and the development of his style

Pervasive Listeria monocytogenes is common in the Norwegian food system and is associated with increased prevalence of stress survival and resistance determinants

To investigate the diversity, distribution, persistence, and prevalence of stress survival and resistance genes of Listeria monocytogenes clones dominating in food processing environments in Norway, genome sequences from 769 L. monocytogenes isolates from food industry environments, foods, and raw materials (512 of which were sequenced in the present study) were subjected to whole-genome multilocus sequence typing (wgMLST), single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), and comparative genomic analyses. The data set comprised isolates from nine meat and six salmon processing facilities in Norway collected over a period of three decades. The most prevalent clonal complex (CC) was CC121, found in 10 factories, followed by CC7, CC8, and CC9, found in 7 factories each. Overall, 72% of the isolates were classified as persistent, showing 20 or fewer wgMLST allelic differences toward an isolate found in the same factory in a different calendar year. Moreover, over half of the isolates (56%) showed this level of genetic similarity toward an isolate collected from a different food processing facility. These were designated as pervasive strains, defined as clusters with the same level of genetic similarity as persistent strains but isolated from different factories. The prevalence of genetic determinants associated with increased survival in food processing environments, including heavy metal and biocide resistance determinants, stress response genes, and inlA truncation mutations, showed a highly significant increase among pervasive isolates but not among persistent isolates. Furthermore, these genes were significantly more prevalent among the isolates from food processing environments compared to in isolates from natural and rural environments (n = 218) and clinical isolates (n = 111) from NorwaypublishedVersio

A novel service discovery model for decentralised online social networks.

Online social networks (OSNs) have become the most popular Internet application that attracts billions of users to share information, disseminate opinions and interact with others in the online society. The unprecedented growing popularity of OSNs naturally makes using social network services as a pervasive phenomenon in our daily life. The majority of OSNs service providers adopts a centralised architecture because of its management simplicity and content controllability. However, the centralised architecture for large-scale OSNs applications incurs costly deployment of computing infrastructures and suffers performance bottleneck. Moreover, the centralised architecture has two major shortcomings: the single point failure problem and the lack of privacy, which challenges the uninterrupted service provision and raises serious privacy concerns. This thesis proposes a decentralised approach based on peer-to-peer (P2P) networks as an alternative to the traditional centralised architecture. Firstly, a self-organised architecture with self-sustaining social network adaptation has been designed to support decentralised topology maintenance. This self-organised architecture exhibits small-world characteristics with short average path length and large average clustering coefficient to support efficient information exchange. Based on this self-organised architecture, a novel decentralised service discovery model has been developed to achieve a semantic-aware and interest-aware query routing in the P2P social network. The proposed model encompasses a service matchmaking module to capture the hidden semantic information for query-service matching and a homophily-based query processing module to characterise user’s common social status and interests for personalised query routing. Furthermore, in order to optimise the efficiency of service discovery, a swarm intelligence inspired algorithm has been designed to reduce the query routing overhead. This algorithm employs an adaptive forwarding strategy that can adapt to various social network structures and achieves promising search performance with low redundant query overhead in dynamic environments. Finally, a configurable software simulator is implemented to simulate complex networks and to evaluate the proposed service discovery model. Extensive experiments have been conducted through simulations, and the obtained results have demonstrated the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed model.University of Derb