The Original Beat: An Electronic Music Production System and Its Design

The barrier to entry in electronic music production is high. It requires expensive, complicated software, extensive knowledge of music theory and experience with sound generation. Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) are the main tools used to piece together digital sounds and produce a complete song. While these DAWs are great for music professionals, they have a steep learning curve for beginners and they must run native on a user’s computer. For a novice to begin creating music takes much more time, eort, and money than it should. We believe anyone who is interested in creating electronic music deserves a simple way to digitize their ideas and hear results. With this idea in mind, we created a web based, co-creative system to allow beginners and pros alike to easily create electronic digital music. We outline the requirements for such a system and detail the design and architecture. We go through the specifics of the system we implemented covering the front-end, back-end, server, and generation algorithms. Finally, we will review our development time-line, examine the challenges and risks that arose when building our system, and present future improvements

The songwriting coalface: where multiple intelligences collide

This paper investigates pedagogy around songwriting professional practice. Particular focus is given to the multiple intelligence theory of Howard Gardner as a lens through which to view songwriting practice, referenced to recent songwriting‐specific research (e.g. McIntyre, Bennett). Songwriting education provides some unique challenges; firstly, due to the qualitative nature of assessment and the complex and multi‐faceted nature of skills necessary (lyric writing, composing, recording, and performing), and secondly, in some less‐tangible capacities beneficial to the songwriter (creative skills, and nuanced choice‐making). From the perspective of songwriting education, Gardner’s MI theory provides a ‘useful fiction’ (his term) for knowledge transfer in the domain, especially (and for this researcher, surprisingly) in naturalistic intelligence

A Functional Taxonomy of Music Generation Systems

Digital advances have transformed the face of automatic music generation since its beginnings at the dawn of computing. Despite the many breakthroughs, issues such as the musical tasks targeted by different machines and the degree to which they succeed remain open questions. We present a functional taxonomy for music generation systems with reference to existing systems. The taxonomy organizes systems according to the purposes for which they were designed. It also reveals the inter-relatedness amongst the systems. This design-centered approach contrasts with predominant methods-based surveys and facilitates the identification of grand challenges to set the stage for new breakthroughs.Comment: survey, music generation, taxonomy, functional survey, survey, automatic composition, algorithmic compositio

The State of the Guitar in Kathmandu

The thriving guitar scene in Kathmandu is not well known outside of the country, and particularly not in the West. It has also not been the topic of much recent scholarship. It has been assumed that for Nepalis the guitar, as a foreign instrument, represents freedom and modernity; but, is this true, and what else might it signify to Nepali guitarists themselves? This article gives an overview of the history of the guitar in Kathmandu by drawing on both published scholarship and interviews conducted by the authors with twelve prominent Nepalese guitarists and guitar educators to establish the current state and future outlook of the guitar in Nepal. Findings suggest that, in addition to freedom and modernity, the guitar is connected with individualism, and is becoming naturalized and less foreign than it used to be

The song system of the human brain.

Although sophisticated insights have been gained into the neurobiology of singing in songbirds, little comparable knowledge exists for humans, the most complex singers in nature. Human song complexity is evidenced by the capacity to generate both richly structured melodies and coordinated multi-part harmonizations. The present study aimed to elucidate this multi-faceted vocal system by using 15O-water positron emission tomography to scan ?listen and respond? performances of amateur musicians either singing repetitions of novel melodies, singing harmonizations with novel melodies, or vocalizing monotonically. Overall, major blood flow increases were seen in the primary and secondary auditory cortices, primary motor cortex, frontal operculum, supplementary motor area, insula, posterior cerebellum, and basal ganglia. Melody repetition and harmonization produced highly similar patterns of activation. However, whereas all three tasks activated secondary auditory cortex (posterior Brodmann Area 22), only melody repetition and harmonization activated the planum polare (BA 38). This result implies that BA 38 is responsible for an even higher level of musical processing than BA 22. Finally, all three of these ?listen and respond? tasks activated the frontal operculum (Broca's area), a region involved in cognitive/motor sequence production and imitation, thereby implicating it in musical imitation and vocal learning

Debussy's string quartet in the Brussels salon of "La Libre Esthetique"

The second performance of Debussy's String Quartet, given by the Ysaye Quartet on an all-Debussy program during the 1894 salon of "La Libre Esthétique" in Brussels, offers an ideal context for a critical reexamination of his musical and aesthetic affinities at this pivotal moment. In the first place, a view to the salon's other three concerts, which honored Beethoven alongside recent works by Societe Nationale composers, encourages reconsideration of Debussy's own response to the "great tradition" in the work he ironically designated "Opus 10." But at the same time, due regard to his other contemporaneous compositional obsessions, as exemplified in the works programmed alongside the Quartet, raises the question as to how such self-conscious dialogue with Classical models related to more pressing, post-Wagnerian musical negotiations. Pursuit of this question through analysis of the first movement's reconfigured sonata form ultimately suggests ways to distinguish, from amid the myriad post-Impressionist artists on view in the "Free Aesthetic" salon itself, those painters whose visual explorations most tellingly paralleled Debussy's own "games" with musical syntax and expression in the early 1890s