Sink or swim : on associative structuring in longer Latvian folksongs

The oral tradition of Latvian lyrical folksongs, or dainas, began to be recorded at the beginning of the last century and is currently available in both the printed and the electronic media. These songs are in octosyllabic blank verse divided by a caesura, and the overwhelming majority of them follow a trochaic meter, the rest being dactylic.1 The classical source is the collection of 217,996 text versions classified and published by Krisjanis Barons (Barons and Visendorfs 1894-1915), in which a "song" is typically presented as a brief, epigrammatic quatrain unit, with barely 10[percent] of the material consisting of texts longer than eight lines. The same system of text identification was adopted in the supplement to this corpus published by Peateris Smits (1936-39) and in the Daina Data Base (1982), a transcription of a 12-volume collection incorporating the essential elements of both these primary sources (Svabe et al. 1952-56).Not

Annotated Bibliography to 1985

Processing note: review needed SoR: With the assistance of Sarah FeenyAbstractNot

Functional Scaffolding for Musical Composition: A New Approach in Computer-Assisted Music Composition

While it is important for systems intended to enhance musical creativity to define and explore musical ideas conceived by individual users, many limit musical freedom by focusing on maintaining musical structure, thereby impeding the user\u27s freedom to explore his or her individual style. This dissertation presents a comprehensive body of work that introduces a new musical representation that allows users to explore a space of musical rules that are created from their own melodies. This representation, called functional scaffolding for musical composition (FSMC), exploits a simple yet powerful property of multipart compositions: The pattern of notes and rhythms in different instrumental parts of the same song are functionally related. That is, in principle, one part can be expressed as a function of another. Music in FSMC is represented accordingly as a functional relationship between an existing human composition, or scaffold, and an additional generated voice. This relationship is encoded by a type of artificial neural network called a compositional pattern producing network (CPPN). A human user without any musical expertise can then explore how these additional generated voices should relate to the scaffold through an interactive evolutionary process akin to animal breeding. The utility of this insight is validated by two implementations of FSMC called NEAT Drummer and MaestroGenesis, that respectively help users tailor drum patterns and complete multipart arrangements from as little as a single original monophonic track. The five major contributions of this work address the overarching hypothesis in this dissertation that functional relationships alone, rather than specialized music theory, are sufficient for generating plausible additional voices. First, to validate FSMC and determine whether plausible generated voices result from the human-composed scaffold or intrinsic properties of the CPPN, drum patterns are created with NEAT Drummer to accompany several different polyphonic pieces. Extending the FSMC approach to generate pitched voices, the second contribution reinforces the importance of functional transformations through quality assessments that indicate that some partially FSMC-generated pieces are indistinguishable from those that are fully human. While the third contribution focuses on constructing and exploring a space of plausible voices with MaestroGenesis, the fourth presents results from a two-year study where students discuss their creative experience with the program. Finally, the fifth contribution is a plugin for MaestroGenesis called MaestroGenesis Voice (MG-V) that provides users a more natural way to incorporate MaestroGenesis in their creative endeavors by allowing scaffold creation through the human voice. Together, the chapters in this dissertation constitute a comprehensive approach to assisted music generation, enabling creativity without the need for musical expertise

09051 Abstracts Collection -- Knowledge representation for intelligent music processing

From the twenty-fifth to the thirtieth of January, 2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09051 on ``Knowledge representation for intelligent music processing\u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Centre for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations and demos given during the seminar as well as plenary presentations, reports of workshop discussions, results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general, followed by plenary `stimulus\u27 papers, followed by reports and abstracts arranged by workshop followed finally by some concluding materials providing views of both the seminar itself and also forward to the longer-term goals of the discipline. Links to extended abstracts, full papers and supporting materials are provided, if available. The organisers thank David Lewis for editing these proceedings

Epics along the Silk Roads : mental text, performance, and written codification

The idea of launching studies on the epics to be found along the Silk Roads was born in France and Finland almost simultaneously in 1989-90. At the 25th General Conference of UNESCO held in Paris in October-November 1989, a long and bureaucratic, yet historical process was brought to a happy end when the Recommendation on the Safeguarding of Traditional Culture and Folklore was adopted by the Conference. The aim of this hitherto most authoritative document about the importance of folklore and oral traditions for national, ethnic, and regional cultural identities and for world culture in general was to raise awareness of the role of modern documentation work in creating new cultural resources through conservation, preservation, and dissemination of fragile local traditions (Honko 1989a, 1990b).Issue title; "Epics Along the Silk Roads.

Hispanic Oral Literature: Accomplishments and Perspectives

Hispanic oral literature, together with the Portuguese which should not be separated from it, encompasses a great chronological as well as geographical span, since it is an integral part of the cultural heritage that has accompanied the Spanish and Portuguese people over the centuries wherever they have chanced to establish themselves. Scholarly interest has focused primarily upon two oral genres, the epic and the ballad, while the lyric and the folktale have been accorded less attention, and the proverb almost none at all. The total amount of material published, particularly on the epic and ballad, is enormous. The last decade or so has produced a veritable explosion of critical interest in these traditional forms. After establishing the critical background, we have tried to include here studies that either make a significant contribution or are representative of a certain method or approach. This means that many fine studies are not mentioned solely because of limitations of space. It will be observed that not all of this work has been carried out by oralists. In the belief that good basic research is of value to all, no matter what a particular scholar's theoretical persuasion may be, a number of items have been cited that were destined to support other points of view.--Page 344.Ruth House Webber (University of Chicago, Emerita) was the first to introduce the scholarship of Parry and Lord to Spanish medieval literature in 1951. She is author of a long and distinguished series of articles and monographs on the oral traditional forms of epic and ballad, especially in relation to questions of style and narrative structure

Automatic Detection of Melodic Patterns in Flamenco Singing by Analyzing Polyphonic Music Recordings

In this work an analysis of characteristic melodic pattern in flamenco fandango style is carried out. Contrary to other analysis, where corpora are searched for characteristic melodic patterns, in this work characteristic melodic patterns are defined by flamenco experts and then searched in the corpora. In our case, the corpora were composed of pieces taken from two fandango styles, Valverde fandangos and Huelva capital fandangos. The chosen styles are representative of fandango styles and are also different as for their musical characteristics. The patterns provided by the flamenco experts were specified in MIDI format, but the corpora under study were provided in audio format. Two algorithms had to be designed to accomplish the goal of our research: first, an algorithm extracting audio features from the corpus and outputting a MIDI-like format; second, an algorithm to actually perform the search based on the output provided by the first algorithm. Flamenco experts assessed the results of the searches and drew conclusions

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

Annotated bibliography 1986-1990

The following compilation represents the third installment of Oral Tradition's ongoing annotated bibliography of scholarship relevant to the field. This addition, covering the years 1986-1990, maintains the goals of the first two installments: 1) to update John Miles Foley's original bibliography, Oral-Formulaic Theory and Research (Garland 1985), which provided an annotated listing of scholarship on the Parry-Lord theory of oral composition up until 1982, and 2) to expand the scope of the bibliography into other fields related to the study of oral traditions. The initial year of this installment also marks the beginning of Oral Tradition itself, and all articles published in the journal from 1986-1990 are herein annotated.Not

Impact of a Comprehensive Musicianship Through Performance Program on an International School Band During COVID-19

The threats of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020 resulted in schools moving to online learning and impacted programs with cocurricular activities, especially band programs. Student retention, low enrollment, loss of interest, and lower motivation became liabilities for band programs during the pandemic. Therefore, having an engaging online band program is crucial to continue effective music learning and maintain a high standard of band instruction. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of a Comprehensive Musicianship through Performance (CMP) program on an international school band during COVID-19. Forty-six participants ages 13-16 were recruited from the senior band through convenience sampling. Surveys were conducted in two phases using close-ended questions. The close-ended questions employed a 10-point Likert-type scale. Participants completed the survey for phase 1 before implementing the CMP program and completed the survey for phase 2 after participating in the CMP program. Both surveys were administered through Google Forms and WhatsApp. The findings of this research may assist the improvement and function of remote band instruction. In addition, this research considers the implications of remote learning on affective, cognitive, and psychomotor skills development while enhancing student engagement and developing a positive attitude towards remote music instruction methods