Impressionistic techniques applied in sound art & design

Sound art and design collectively refer to the process of specifying, acquiring, manipulating or generating sonic elements to evoke emotion and environment. Sound is used to convey the intentions, emotions, spirit or aura of a story, performance, or sonic installation. Sound connects unique aural environments, creating an immersive experience via mood and atmosphere. Impressionistic techniques such as Impasto, Pointillism, Sgraffito, Stippling introduced by 19th-century painters captured the essence of their subject in more vivid compositions, exuding authentic movements and atmosphere. This thesis applied impressionistic techniques using sound art and design to project specific mood and atmosphere responses among listeners. Four unique sound textures, each representing a technique from Impressionism, and a fifth composite sound texture were created for this project. All five sound textures were validated as representative of their respective Impressionistic technique. Only sonic Pointillism matched its emotive intent. This outcome supports the research question that sound art and design can be used to direct listeners’ mood and atmosphere responses. Partnering Impressionistic principles with sound art and design offers a deeper palette to sonically deliver more robust, holistic soundscapes for amplifying an audience’s listening experience. This project provides a foundation for future explorations and studies in applying cross-disciplinary artistic techniques with sound art and design or other artistic endeavors

Program notes of graduate recital

Master's Project (M.Mu.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This paper discusses the four pieces of the graduate recital of student Evanthia Maniatopoulou; Johann Sebastian Bach's Prelude and Fugue in F minor, Well-Tempered Clavier Book II, BWV 881; Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30, Op. 109; Frederic Chopin's Scherzo No. 3, Op. 39; and Sergei Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 7, Op. 83. It is divided into four chapters, with one chapter dedicated to each piece. In each chapter there is a discussion about the composer's background, then some comments about his compositional style in general, then some information about the genre in which every piece falls into, and finally a brief analysis and discussion about the specific piece that was in the graduate recital.Chapter 1. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) -- Chapter 2. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) -- Chapter 3. Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) -- Chapter 4. Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953) -- Bibliography

PerformanceNet: Score-to-Audio Music Generation with Multi-Band Convolutional Residual Network

Music creation is typically composed of two parts: composing the musical score, and then performing the score with instruments to make sounds. While recent work has made much progress in automatic music generation in the symbolic domain, few attempts have been made to build an AI model that can render realistic music audio from musical scores. Directly synthesizing audio with sound sample libraries often leads to mechanical and deadpan results, since musical scores do not contain performance-level information, such as subtle changes in timing and dynamics. Moreover, while the task may sound like a text-to-speech synthesis problem, there are fundamental differences since music audio has rich polyphonic sounds. To build such an AI performer, we propose in this paper a deep convolutional model that learns in an end-to-end manner the score-to-audio mapping between a symbolic representation of music called the piano rolls and an audio representation of music called the spectrograms. The model consists of two subnets: the ContourNet, which uses a U-Net structure to learn the correspondence between piano rolls and spectrograms and to give an initial result; and the TextureNet, which further uses a multi-band residual network to refine the result by adding the spectral texture of overtones and timbre. We train the model to generate music clips of the violin, cello, and flute, with a dataset of moderate size. We also present the result of a user study that shows our model achieves higher mean opinion score (MOS) in naturalness and emotional expressivity than a WaveNet-based model and two commercial sound libraries. We open our source code at https://github.com/bwang514/PerformanceNetComment: 8 pages, 6 figures, AAAI 2019 camera-ready versio

Boston University Symphonic Chorus: Music for Chorus and Brass

This is the concert program of the Boston University Symphonic Chorus performance on Thursday, April 3, 1997 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were Jubilate Deo, Plaudite, and In ecclesiis by Giovanni Gabrieli, Psalm 100, Die mit Thranen, and Selig sind die Toten by Heinrich Schutz, Nin danket alle Gott by Johann Pachelbel, Two Motets, "Offertorium" and "Ecce sacerdos" by Anton Bruckner, and To Saint Cecilia by Norman Dello Joio. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

An examination of the keyboard technique of Bach, Haydn, Chopin, Scriabin and Prokofiev

Master's Project (M.Mu.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016In this research paper, I will explore the keyboard technique of each composer presented in my recital: J.S. Bach, Franz Joseph Haydn, Frederic Chopin, Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Prokofiev. I hope to elucidate the physical approach used by each composer, and show in turn how that same approach influenced the music of each composer by analyzing the pieces performed in my recital. To understand the distinct technique of the composers, it is important to know some context. The instrument each composer wrote for necessarily influenced their technique and resulting composition. However, the instrument cannot explain every facet of technique, and it becomes necessary to understand the underlying aesthetics of technique. Moving chronologically from Bach to Prokofiev, a general trend of expansion in the use of the hand and arm will be seen throughout. Keyboards became louder and heavier in touch and the hand faced greater reaches in every generation. The technique of Bach and Haydn was largely focused on compact and relaxed hands with distinct finger movements, while Scriabin and Prokofiev at the other end require sweeping gestures that occupy the entire arm. However, it would be too easy to present this progression as a story that technique is only getting better and better, implying that the older composers were inferior to the later. That is simply false. Instead, extended study of each composer shows that many technical principles are universal. The baroque keyboardists were likely playing with more weight than popularly imagined and one cannot play Scriabin with mittens on the hands