Down the musical garden path: Shared syntactic processing in music and language

Honors (Bachelor's)Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience (BCN)University of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139620/1/janeabr.pd

Desire and the drives: a new analytical approach to the harmonic language of Alexander Skryabin

The aims of this project are two-fold. Firstly, it aims to correlate the erotically charged philosophy of Alexander Skryabin with the progressive harmonic structures of his music. Secondly it proposes a new harmonic theory which is designed to offer a deeper understanding of the ways in which music can represent and embody the mechanisms of the human 'drive'. This involves unravelling the numerous strands of thought - both esoteric and mainstream ― that constructed Skryabin's idiosyncratic and highly eccentric world-view. To understand fully tills complex body of ideas it appeals to 20(^th) century psychoanalysis in the Freudian tradition. This vital link connects Skryabin's interest in psychology and philosophy to his compositional procedures whilst showing that certain of Freud's ideas were crystallised in writings on desire from the 1960ร which also brought the various contradictions betrayed in Skryabin's writings into the spotlight. In some cases, Skryabin's music itself offers safe paths out of his philosophical quagmire, where the formal propositions of his writings fail. Whilst the harmonic theory proposed is deeply rooted in the philosophy that Skryabin himself studied, it is equally grown from a correspondence between current trends of analytical thought in music and analytical trends that have been predominant in Russia. Whilst the first chapter outlays the philosophical basis of my theory, the following three chapters explore the intricacies of my analytical system in purely musical terms to present a line of inquiry termed drive analysis. The remaining three chapters pick up the philosophical thread and slowly draw my various strands together in a concluding analysis of Skryabin's Poem of Ecstasy

Exploiting prior knowledge during automatic key and chord estimation from musical audio

Chords and keys are two ways of describing music. They are exemplary of a general class of symbolic notations that musicians use to exchange information about a music piece. This information can range from simple tempo indications such as “allegro” to precise instructions for a performer of the music. Concretely, both keys and chords are timed labels that describe the harmony during certain time intervals, where harmony refers to the way music notes sound together. Chords describe the local harmony, whereas keys offer a more global overview and consequently cover a sequence of multiple chords. Common to all music notations is that certain characteristics of the music are described while others are ignored. The adopted level of detail depends on the purpose of the intended information exchange. A simple description such as “menuet”, for example, only serves to roughly describe the character of a music piece. Sheet music on the other hand contains precise information about the pitch, discretised information pertaining to timing and limited information about the timbre. Its goal is to permit a performer to recreate the music piece. Even so, the information about timing and timbre still leaves some space for interpretation by the performer. The opposite of a symbolic notation is a music recording. It stores the music in a way that allows for a perfect reproduction. The disadvantage of a music recording is that it does not allow to manipulate a single aspect of a music piece in isolation, or at least not without degrading the quality of the reproduction. For instance, it is not possible to change the instrumentation in a music recording, even though this would only require the simple change of a few symbols in a symbolic notation. Despite the fundamental differences between a music recording and a symbolic notation, the two are of course intertwined. Trained musicians can listen to a music recording (or live music) and write down a symbolic notation of the played piece. This skill allows one, in theory, to create a symbolic notation for each recording in a music collection. In practice however, this would be too labour intensive for the large collections that are available these days through online stores or streaming services. Automating the notation process is therefore a necessity, and this is exactly the subject of this thesis. More specifically, this thesis deals with the extraction of keys and chords from a music recording. A database with keys and chords opens up applications that are not possible with a database of music recordings alone. On one hand, chords can be used on their own as a compact representation of a music piece, for example to learn how to play an accompaniment for singing. On the other hand, keys and chords can also be used indirectly to accomplish another goal, such as finding similar pieces. Because music theory has been studied for centuries, a great body of knowledge about keys and chords is available. It is known that consecutive keys and chords form sequences that are all but random. People happen to have certain expectations that must be fulfilled in order to experience music as pleasant. Keys and chords are also strongly intertwined, as a given key implies that certain chords will likely occur and a set of given chords implies an encompassing key in return. Consequently, a substantial part of this thesis is concerned with the question whether musicological knowledge can be embedded in a technical framework in such a way that it helps to improve the automatic recognition of keys and chords. The technical framework adopted in this thesis is built around a hidden Markov model (HMM). This facilitates an easy separation of the different aspects involved in the automatic recognition of keys and chords. Most experiments reviewed in the thesis focus on taking into account musicological knowledge about the musical context and about the expected chord duration. Technically speaking, this involves a manipulation of the transition probabilities in the HMMs. To account for the interaction between keys and chords, every HMM state is actually representing the combination of a key and a chord label. In the first part of the thesis, a number of alternatives for modelling the context are proposed. In particular, separate key change and chord change models are defined such that they closely mirror the way musicians conceive harmony. Multiple variants are considered that differ in the size of the context that is accounted for and in the knowledge source from which they were compiled. Some models are derived from a music corpus with key and chord notations whereas others follow directly from music theory. In the second part of the thesis, the contextual models are embedded in a system for automatic key and chord estimation. The features used in that system are so-called chroma profiles, which represent the saliences of the pitch classes in the audio signal. These chroma profiles are acoustically modelled by means of templates (idealised profiles) and a distance measure. In addition to these acoustic models and the contextual models developed in the first part, durational models are also required. The latter ensure that the chord and key estimations attain specified mean durations. The resulting system is then used to conduct experiments that provide more insight into how each system component contributes to the ultimate key and chord output quality. During the experimental study, the system complexity gets gradually increased, starting from a system containing only an acoustic model of the features that gets subsequently extended, first with duration models and afterwards with contextual models. The experiments show that taking into account the mean key and mean chord duration is essential to arrive at acceptable results for both key and chord estimation. The effect of using contextual information, however, is highly variable. On one hand, the chord change model has only a limited positive impact on the chord estimation accuracy (two to three percentage points), but this impact is fairly stable across different model variants. On the other hand, the chord change model has a much larger potential to improve the key output quality (up to seventeen percentage points), but only on the condition that the variant of the model is well adapted to the tested music material. Lastly, the key change model has only a negligible influence on the system performance. In the final part of this thesis, a couple of extensions to the formerly presented system are proposed and assessed. First, the global mean chord duration is replaced by key-chord specific values, which has a positive effect on the key estimation performance. Next, the HMM system is modified such that the prior chord duration distribution is no longer a geometric distribution but one that better approximates the observed durations in an appropriate data set. This modification leads to a small improvement of the chord estimation performance, but of course, it requires the availability of a suitable data set with chord notations from which to retrieve a target durational distribution. A final experiment demonstrates that increasing the scope of the contextual model only leads to statistically insignificant improvements. On top of that, the required computational load increases greatly

Sonata Form as Temporal Process: A Form-functional Approach to Anton Bruckner’s Symphonic First Movements

The clichéd view that Bruckner’s sonata form is a motionless architecture devoid of dynamic processes has long contributed to detaching his form from the mainstream post-Beethovenian tradition. In aiming to overcome this view, this study seeks to elucidate processual aspects of Bruckner’s form with a modified form-functional approach, which conceptualises sonata form as a hierarchical temporal process based on the dialectical interaction between stability and instability. By shedding light on Bruckner’s exceptional care for formal syntax on various levels and its close association with the overarching tonal plot, this study reveals that the expression of continuous temporality occurring across discrete formal entities is Bruckner’s fundamental tool for reinvigorating sonata form’s inherent temporal process in the post-Romantic context. Bruckner’s treatment of low-level syntax in the opening themes indicates that he often employs prematurely harmonic instability, which in turn contributes to the linear expression of the beginning–middle–end temporal cycle inherent in sentence construction. At the higher level, the inter-thematic beginning, middle and end in the exposition are redistributed to the three theme groups, which express their unique temporal domain involving a dialectic interaction between teleology and recursion while delineating a gradual and continuous tonal journey from the home key to the subordinate key. The rest of the movement is arranged as a gradual homecoming journey, with each subsequent large-scale part making meaningful contributions and addressing the previously suggested tonal instability. These findings suggest how meticulous Bruckner was in his attention to the inherent dynamic process of sonata form by skilfully arranging the hierarchical form-functional syntax to align with the teleological tonal discourse

Analytical Variations – Eight Critical Essays on Applied Music Theory

This book gives a critical account of various methods used in music analysis. In the first chapter, a number of current approaches such as semiotics, musical implications, Schenkerian analysis, and generative theory are demonstrated on Mozart’s K. 331 theme. Five essays deal with important concepts in music analysis: ambiguity, formal proportions, and similarity within and between works. A further chapter provides a discussion of probability, kinship, and influence – decisive criteria when judging musical plagiarism. The last essay, studying a piece by Schubert, sifts the prospects of deciphering a composer’s sexual leanings from his music

Climax Structure in Late Romantic Opera

When people listen to music, they tend to perceive dynamic rise and fall, often without preliminary knowledge of musical structures and mechanism. This perception of musical dynamism has long been assumed too intuitive and natural to merit serious academic attention. The present dissertation aims to address this neglect by approaching musical dynamism as a logical, systematic process. A formal analytical model, the climax archetype, is proposed for understanding the workings of musical dynamism; to this end, the dissertation focuses on late Romantic operas, especially the works of Wagner and verismo composers, which are characterized by intense musical, dramatic, and emotional dynamism. The first three chapters in this dissertation serve as a springboard for the presentation of the climax archetype in the following two core chapters. Most chapters are divided into two subchapters. Chapter 1 reviews terms and concepts on climax and highpoint. Subchapter 1.1 introduces Ernst Kurth’s climax theory, presented in Bruckner (1925), as a historical precedent for climax study in the modern era; emphasis is put on his concept of dynamic building, and its parameters and operational principles. Subchapter 1.2 surveys studies (mostly those by post-Kurthian scholars) in analysis related to climax building. Chapter 2 scrutinizes the various parameters used in climax building and integrated in the climax archetype. Subchapter 2.1 investigates solo operations of individual parameters such as harmony, pace acceleration, dynamics, melodic contour and pitch, and instrumentation; subchapter 2.2 addresses parametric interaction. Chapter 3 discusses narrative and dynamic arcs in literary theory and music, which provide prototypes for the climax archetype. Subchapter 3.1 examines bipartite, tripartite, and quintipartite narrative forms in literary theory; subchapter 3.2 moves on to dynamic trajectories in music and investigates dynamism in phrase or formal units, demonstrated primarily through analysis of Romantic opera. Chapter 4 articulates the climax archetype—comprised of initiation, intensification, optional delay, highpoint, and abatement—as a model to explain dynamic processes in late Romantic opera; normative examples are drawn from music by Beethoven, Bellini, Wagner, and Giordano. Chapter 5 magnifies the applicability of the climax archetype by embracing modification and variants seen in non-normative climax structures. Subchapter 5.1 delves into internal climax deformations, including the fusion or absence of climax stages, high region, and highpoint frustration; subchapter 5.2 proceeds to compound structures such as the climax succession and climax nesting. The climax archetype and its modifications broaden the analytical scope of musical dynamism in Romantic opera from the well-researched groundswell in the bel canto repertoire to diverse structures beyond the conventional form (la solita forma). Furthermore, the dissertation explains how musical climaxes interact with certain dramatic circumstances or psychological dynamics, emphasizing the prevailing aesthetic of unified musical-dramatic development. Finally, this study suggests compositional principles shared between Wagner and verismo works; out of this examination, a musical-structural principle is proposed for replacing the prevailing but inadequate definition of “verismo” as realism in opera

Proceedings of the 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the SMC2010 - 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference, July 21st - July 24th 2010