Straddling the intersection

Music technology straddles the intersection between art and science and presents those who choose to work within its sphere with many practical challenges as well as creative possibilities. The paper focuses on four main areas: secondary education, higher education, practice and research and finally collaboration. The paper emphasises the importance of collaboration in tackling the challenges of interdisciplinarity and in influencing future technological developments

RL-Duet: Online Music Accompaniment Generation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper presents a deep reinforcement learning algorithm for online accompaniment generation, with potential for real-time interactive human-machine duet improvisation. Different from offline music generation and harmonization, online music accompaniment requires the algorithm to respond to human input and generate the machine counterpart in a sequential order. We cast this as a reinforcement learning problem, where the generation agent learns a policy to generate a musical note (action) based on previously generated context (state). The key of this algorithm is the well-functioning reward model. Instead of defining it using music composition rules, we learn this model from monophonic and polyphonic training data. This model considers the compatibility of the machine-generated note with both the machine-generated context and the human-generated context. Experiments show that this algorithm is able to respond to the human part and generate a melodic, harmonic and diverse machine part. Subjective evaluations on preferences show that the proposed algorithm generates music pieces of higher quality than the baseline method

Furthering Development of Smart Fabrics to Improve the Accessibility of Music Therapy

In this paper, we present the design and development of HarmonicThreads, a smart, cost-effective fabric augmented by generative machine learning algorithms to create music in real time according to the user\u27s interaction. In this manner, we hypothesize that individuals with sensory differences could take advantage of the fabric\u27s flexibility, the music will adapt according to users\u27 interaction, and the affordable hardware we propose will make it more accessible. We follow a design thinking methodology using data from a multidisciplinary team in Mexico and the United States. Then we will close this paper by discussing challenges in developing accessible smart fabrics in different contexts

Model Konversi Notasi Kepatihan ke dalam Format MIDI untuk Pembangkitan Musik Barat Orisinal

Musik orisinal merupakan komposisi baru yang diciptakan dengan memodifikasi elemen-elemen musik menggunakan metode yang belum pernah dilakukan sebelumnya. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengembangkan sistem pembangkitan musik Barat orisinal yang diukur berdasarkan pola urutan nada dan distribusinya yang diakuisisi dari musik Gamelan, musik tradisional dari Jawa. Lembar musik Gamelan yang digunakan sebagai sumber data dikonversi ke dalam format MIDI untuk dijadikan input bagi pelatihan jaringan LSTM berdasarkan informasi nada, langkah dan durasi. Selanjutnya, teknik sequence prediction digunakan untuk membangkitkan output nada berdasarkan input nada sebelumnya. Hasil pembangkitan musik Barat orisinal berupa data dalam format file MIDI dan visualisasinya dalam format notasi Balok. Evaluasi pada pelatihan jaringan LSTM menunjukkan hasil yang baik dengan tingkat loss sebesar 0,1. Evaluasi tingkat kemiripan pola urutan nada dan distribusinya dilakukan menggunakan grafik distribusi sampel nada, langkah dan durasi, dan hasilnya menunjukkan tingkat kemiripan yang baik

Faculty Excellence

Each year, the University of New Hampshire selects a small number of its outstanding faculty for special recognition of their achievements in teaching, scholarship and service. Awards for Excellence in Teaching are given in each college and school, and university-wide awards recognize public service, research, teaching and engagement. This booklet details the year\u27s award winners\u27 accomplishments in short profiles with photographs and text