A Survey of AI Music Generation Tools and Models

In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of AI music generation tools, including both research projects and commercialized applications. To conduct our analysis, we classified music generation approaches into three categories: parameter-based, text-based, and visual-based classes. Our survey highlights the diverse possibilities and functional features of these tools, which cater to a wide range of users, from regular listeners to professional musicians. We observed that each tool has its own set of advantages and limitations. As a result, we have compiled a comprehensive list of these factors that should be considered during the tool selection process. Moreover, our survey offers critical insights into the underlying mechanisms and challenges of AI music generation

African American Gospel Piano Style In The 21St Century: A Collective Case Study

The purpose of this study was to examine the African American gospel piano style in the 21st century, further examining the role of musical enculturation, transmission, and preservation through the lived experiences and perspectives as reported by five gospel pianists throughout the United States. A collective case study design (Stake, 1995) was used to explore how the gospel piano style is being learned, developed, transformed, transmitted, and preserved. Research questions focused on participants’ beliefs about the stylistic transformation of gospel piano in the 21st century and factors that influences those beliefs such as past and present stylistic developments. The data generation method included semi-structured interviews, artifacts, biographies, and recordings. Findings revealed that gospel piano is: (1) primarily learned informally through aural acquisition and listening to other gospel pianists and genres; (2) developed through experiential learning through church performance with assistance from mentors and supportive networks; (3) experienced transformation in the 21st century through evolution, commercialism, infusion of new genres, virtuosic musicianship; and (4) is being transmitted and preserved through teaching, technology, notation, and scholarship. These findings provide valuable insights into the African American gospel piano style for novice and practicing gospel pianists as they continue to develop and become efficient in the genre and for music educators interested in understanding this genre and style of performance practices

Measuring Expressive Music Performances: a Performance Science Model using Symbolic Approximation

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any types of large datasets is the likelihood of detecting meaningless relationships the more dimensions are included. One possible choice is to create algorithms that address both volume and complexity. Another, and the approach chosen here, is to apply techniques that reduce both the dimensionality and numerosity of the music datasets while assuring the statistical significance of results. This dissertation describes a flexible computational model, based on symbolic approximation of timeseries, that can extract time-related characteristics of music performances to generate performance fingerprints (dissimilarities from an ‘average performance’) to be used for comparative purposes. The model is applied to recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment, Opus 47 (1949), having initially been validated on Chopin Mazurkas.1 The results are subsequently used to test hypotheses about evolution in performance styles of the Phantasy since its composition. It is hoped that further research will examine other works and types of music in order to improve this model and make it useful to other music researchers. In addition to its benefits for performance analysis, it is suggested that the model has clear applications at least in music fraud detection, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and in pedagogical applications for music education

La musique des lumières: The Enlightenment Origins of French Revolutionary Music, 1789-1799

It is commonly believed that the music of the French Revolution (1789-1799) represented an unusual rupture in compositional praxis. Suddenly patriotic hymns, chansons, operas and instrumental works overthrew the supremacy of music merely for entertainment as the staple of musical life in France. It is the contention of this thesis that this ‘rupture’ had in fact been a long time developing, and that the germ of this process was sown in the philosophie of the previous decades. In essence, I assert that to understand the Revolutionaries’ ambitions for music which treated music as a pedagogical tool, it is imperative to evaluate their basis in Enlightenment musical aesthetics. In order to justify this assertion, I will examine the evidence from three angles in respective chapters. The first chapter will consider the nature of Enlightenment musical aesthetics, its foundations in Classical conceptions of music, and its path to the Revolution. The second chapter will consider the ways in which this perspective was adopted and transformed by the Revolutionary authorities, who sought a system of music (and the arts) which could inculcate Republican principles. In the last chapter, I will complete the present study by examining the nature of the Revolution’s political music itself, evaluating two case studies and taking into account modern scholarship’s interpretation of the repertoire

The aestheticization of tradition: professional Afroperuvian musicians, cultural reclamation, and artisitc interpretation

textFor the last two decades, professional Afroperuvian musicians have had to ask themselves how to best maintain the musical legacy they inherited from an earlier generation of individuals who were invested in the rescue of traditions, many of which were at the verge of being forgotten. Today, contemporary performers move about a complex space, often crossing what appear to be conventional boundaries that differentiate between artists, academics, and culture bearers. The question then becomes, why and how is it that these individuals seek to assume these various roles and to what extent do these help further the development of musical practices that were in the process of being forgotten half a century ago? This is the central question that will guide this dissertation, a question that will most often be couched in terms of the different types of strategies that are available to performers as they assume these different roles, the authority that each of these can afford, and the limitations and contradictions between them. To this end, I chronicle the various strategies that contemporary Afroperuvian musicians have inherited from their predecessors as the project of developing a new sense of Afroperuvian identity underwent its own historical and ideological transformation, from a modernist movement concerned with the delineation of cultural distinctiveness to a variety of strategies that invoke the notion of art as means of elaborating complimentary, although still imperfect alternatives. First, I will discuss the authority that musicians can still find in the invocation of culture, history and academic research and how these have informed social hierarchies within the Afroperuvian professional musician community. I will also focus on critiques by musicians regarding how the more recent institutionalization and commodification of Afroperuvian music has led to the reification of musical practice. Finally, I will discuss how reactions to the aforementioned process of commodification have led to the invocation of new strategies that invoke the notion of Afroperuvian music as an artistic endeavor that amount to more than the mere reproduction of revived musical practices from the past.Musi

A pedagogical guide for teaching diatonic modality in the college music theory curriculum

Music theory plays a central role in the education of every college music major and minor. The typical undergraduate music theory core curriculum consists of a four- or five semester sequence of courses. As a result of the emphasis on traditional tonal harmony in Western music education, these core courses concentrate almost exclusively on the major/minor scalar system while marginalizing other types of scales such as diatonic modes. Common undergraduate theory textbooks that include the introduction of modality often only list the basic modal and scalar structures without offering further analysis and application; many other textbooks do not mention the term at all. This project addresses this curricular deficiency via the development of a sequential instructional program on diatonic modality for the undergraduate music theory curriculum. Applying a comprehensive musicianship approach, the project facilitates instruction that makes conceptual connections through listening, analysis, composition, and performance. The final product includes: A firm and broad pedagogical foundation for teaching diatonic modality in the undergraduate music theory curriculum—a research- and learning-theory-based foundation that supports the construction of the detailed scope and sequence. Three instructional principles in particular provide the foundation for the curriculum: sound before symbol, spiral learning, and comprehensive musicianship. A detailed curriculum guide for teaching diatonic modality in the undergraduate music theory core curriculum with a specific focus on the first two years of theory study: fundamentals, diatonic harmony, chromatic harmony, and 20th-century music theory. This includes specific pedagogical recommendations, a comprehensive scope and sequence delineated in three curriculum mapping tables, and thorough sequenced instructional guidelines for each step in the teaching-learning process. The 24 written theory and aural skills plans were specifically designed to be integrated throughout the typical four-semester curriculum. All of the plans are strongly activity-based and built around an extensive core of modal repertoire from all style periods including contemporary pop and jazz, emphasizing the authentic connection with music throughout history. If applied effectively, the innovative curriculum in this guide has the potential to not only significantly improve the teaching and learning of diatonic modality in undergraduate music theory but also to serve as a model that may help transform the overall approach to collegiate music theory instruction.Thesis (D.A.)School of Musi

Using Sound to Represent Uncertainty in Spatial Data

There is a limit to the amount of spatial data that can be shown visually in an effective manner, particularly when the data sets are extensive or complex. Using sound to represent some of these data (sonification) is a way of avoiding visual overload. This thesis creates a conceptual model showing how sonification can be used to represent spatial data and evaluates a number of elements within the conceptual model. These are examined in three different case studies to assess the effectiveness of the sonifications. Current methods of using sonification to represent spatial data have been restricted by the technology available and have had very limited user testing. While existing research shows that sonification can be done, it does not show whether it is an effective and useful method of representing spatial data to the end user. A number of prototypes show how spatial data can be sonified, but only a small handful of these have performed any user testing beyond the authors’ immediate colleagues (where n > 4). This thesis creates and evaluates sonification prototypes, which represent uncertainty using three different case studies of spatial data. Each case study is evaluated by a significant user group (between 45 and 71 individuals) who completed a task based evaluation with the sonification tool, as well as reporting qualitatively their views on the effectiveness and usefulness of the sonification method. For all three case studies, using sound to reinforce information shown visually results in more effective performance from the majority of the participants than traditional visual methods. Participants who were familiar with the dataset were much more effective at using the sonification than those who were not and an interactive sonification which requires significant involvement from the user was much more effective than a static sonification, which did not provide significant user engagement. Using sounds with a clear and easily understood scale (such as piano notes) was important to achieve an effective sonification. These findings are used to improve the conceptual model developed earlier in this thesis and highlight areas for future research

An exploration of how jazz improvisation is taught

The purpose of this study was to explore how master jazz pedagogues and artist-level jazz musicians used pedagogical content knowledge to sequence their instructional methods when teaching jazz improvisation. Pedagogical content knowledge served as the theoretical framework for this study. To gain insights into how they used their knowledge when teaching jazz improvisation, I first sought to explore how they learned to improvise. For this study, an overarching research question “How did the participants learn to improvise in jazz?” aided me with contextualizing how they learned content and pedagogy when they began to improvise. Then, the following questions guided my investigation into how these participants used their pedagogical and content knowledge when they taught jazz improvisation: (1) How, if at all, did the participants’ curriculum knowledge influence their approaches to teaching jazz improvisation? (2) How, if at all, did the participants’ pedagogical knowledge influence their approaches to teaching jazz improvisation? (3) How, if at all, did the participants’ content knowledge influence their approaches to teaching jazz improvisation? In this study both the artist-level musicians and master jazz pedagogues all subscribed to an organic mode of teaching jazz improvisation, and not a one size fits all approach that many published jazz materials espouse. Most of these participants did not utilize an established curriculum for teaching, but rather relied on the knowledge of their students and their own content knowledge of what they know and how they learned for the best practices of teaching. Based on the pedagogical content knowledge they provided in this study, I devised a model for teaching jazz improvisation to undergraduate students. I organized this model by developing an eight-semester, or four-year sequence, of pedagogy and content for instruction. For each academic year, I present a description of what I learned from the participants, and how this pedagogical content knowledge can be used with students to learn how to improvise in jazz. I then present a two-semester outline (one academic year) that demonstrates how the pedagogical principles and content knowledge shared by the participants in this study can be sequenced. Each of the participants in this study taught their students based on their own content knowledge and the knowledge of their students. In order to teach jazz and jazz improvisation, preservice teachers need more than just a casual experience with jazz pedagogy, and should look to increase their own content knowledge in the area of jazz through both formal and informal educational opportunities. Furthermore, the scope of this study was limited to world renowned jazz musicians and educators who taught at the university level and only considered the perspectives of jazz educators. Additional studies could focus on active school music teachers who identify as jazz educators or could involve researchers studying the perspectives of the students regarding how they learn pedagogy and content and how they use/retain this knowledge with improvisation. Keywords: jazz, jazz pedagogy, jazz improvisation, pedagogical content knowledge, jazz educatio

Rethinking Schooling

Taking a collection of seminal articles from the Journal of Curriculum Studies, this book offers readers a vantage point for thinking about the worlds of schools and curricula, focusing in particular on the concept of seeing schools, curricula and teaching in new ways. Each of the chapters sheds fresh light on the ways of thinking the aforementioned. Themes include: classrooms and teaching pedagogy science and history education school and curriculum development students’ lives in schools. Written by an international group of distinguished scholars from Britain, North America, Sweden and Germany, the chapters draw on the perspectives offered by curriculum and pedagogical theory, history, ethnography, sociology, psychology and organisational studies and experiences in curriculum-making. Together they invite many questions about why teaching and curricula must be as they are. Rethinking Schooling provides new futures for education and alternative ways of seeing them