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

Robert Nathaniel Dett and the Music of the Harlem Renaissance

While the contributions of writers and poets to the period of American cultural history known as the Harlem Renaissance are relatively well defined and understood, assessing the contributions of musicians has been more problematic. The topic has been covered indirectly through works of American music history and African American history, but there have been comparatively few works linking music directly to the goals of the movement. Much of the insight into music’s place during this period derives from contemporary writers such as Alain Locke and James Weldon Johnson, both of whom featured discussions of music in their writings. Relatively unknown today, Robert Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943) was one of a group of composers whose work reflects the goals of Locke and other Renaissance writers. This thesis will explore the work of Robert Nathaniel Dett as a composer and educator in the larger context of the Harlem Renaissance. With in-depth biographies of Dett’s life already available, this thesis will focus on the period of his greatest activity during the 1910s and the 1920s while concurrently attempting to establish a larger context for his work by situating it within the course of American music history of the period. Specific topics will include: Dett’s education at Oberlin College and subsequent employment as Music Director at Hampton Institute; how characteristics of Dett’s music aligned with the goals of the Harlem Renaissance; and, Dett’s response to criticism that he was neglecting the authentic heritage of African American music

Outside and Inside: Representations of Interracialism and American Identity in White Jazz Autobiography

This dissertation explores concepts of race, national identity, and gender formation in fifteen autobiographies published by white male American jazz musicians— that is, jazz autobiographies written by male subjects who self-identified, and were identified by their collaborators and by the general public, as white—between 1939 and 2001. A central concern within these autobiographies is the search for authentication within a musical form that has been intrinsically linked to African American musical and cultural forms and practices. A key feature of this quest for authentication is the immersion experience, through which the white male musician seeks immersion in African American musical and cultural spheres as a requirement of his jazz education, and later of his status as a professional musician. In this respect, these accounts reinforce the notion of jazz as one of the few spheres within American society in which cultural authority has been historically granted to African Americans, and in which white musicians, as Burton W. Peretti suggests, “innovated and rebelled by willingly becoming musically subordinate to a socially and culturally subordinated group” (96–97). Through their descriptions of this process, these autobiographers reveal that the playing of jazz created and necessitated interracial and interethnic mingling to a degree rarely seen in the mainstream society out of which these stories emerge. Yet discussions of race in these texts seldom move beyond its specific impact on these musicians’ lives and careers; rarely do white jazz autobiographers attempt a more reflective analysis of race in the United States, nor do they seem willing to acknowledge the benefits that their whiteness conferred upon them in respect to career opportunities and economic security. For these reasons, white jazz autobiography provides a fertile source for considering both the possibilities and limitations of culture—and of individual cultural producers—within 20th-century US society to disrupt, challenge, or circumvent dominant legal and social practice

A New Place at the Table: Ancient Cadential Patterns for Modern Improvision and Aural Skills Training

Contemporary efforts to integrate improvisation practice into institutional music education are many and varied, but lack of improvisatory skill remains an ongoing problem, especially in classical music instruction. Drawing on artisanal training, in which a corpus of memorized repertoire becomes a stylistic knowledge base, source of cognitive schemata and raw material for creative variation, a useful set of historically-derived “standards” can be found in the three introductory cadences used in the Neapolitan conservatory partimento tradition (It. Cadenza Semplice, Cadenza Composta, Cadenza Doppia) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Referencing music cognition research, music theory sources and improvisation discourse, this paper argues that intervallic suspensions in these schemata (4-3, 7-6) can be seen as a simple demonstration of error perception and correction, a cognitive process that can be deployed to develop and strengthen both aural and creative skills. Integration of these cadences into beginner training also suggests a reassessment of the order of introduction of musical elements found in formal music instruction, which privileges the chord as a discrete entity, and relegates intervallic suspension, schemata and counterpoint to intermediate, advanced, or supplementary study. These cadences concisely synthesize and demonstrate contrapuntal interplay and voice leading between bass and treble voices, basic syncopation and rhythmic division, and the concept of dissonance/consonance within linear parameters as an integral aspect of musical form. A series of beginner to intermediate exercises for use in vocal and instrumental training are presented. The dissertation recommends that intervallic suspensions be given a renewed “place at the table,” once again taking their former role as primal examples of compositional structure and aesthetic possibility

Probing the evolutions and proliferations of beatmaking styles in hip hop music

Ph. D. Thesis.This PhD thesis investigates how a multiplicity of distinct styles of hip hop beats have materialised since hip hop music’s initial emergence from New York City in the 1970s. From the outset, I assert that the beat, that is, the musical component that might be thought of as the ‘backing track’ of a hip hop record or live performance, should be considered just as fundamental as an MC’s vocals. I proceed to observe that while hip hop can be – and usually is – invoked to mean a single genre, examples of hip hop beats from disparate regions and periods can sound radically different from one another, exhibiting divergent sonic signatures and compositional approaches. My research seeks to discover and engage critically with the factors that have caused this stylistic diversity. A musicological inquiry that eschews the priorities and standardisations of European-derived musical sensibilities in favour of a meaningful regard for hip hop culture’s aesthetics and creative strategies is pursued as I analyse a selection of significant region-specific and period-specific beat styles, and subsequently, a combination of online ethnographic work and a creative practice element leads my survey on the present state of underground beatmaking practice. Drawing from theories and applications of dialectics, I find that the history of hip hop beats and beatmaking can be apprehended by scrutinising the relationship between underground musical movements and the agents of the capitalist culture industry, with these two conflicting sides effectively working in tandem to ensure hip hop’s continued position at the vanguard of modern popular music. Crucially, I suggest that hip hop beatmaking constitutes a truly revolutionary form of composition that exposes and explodes the latent potentials of music technologies, both established and novel.Northern Bridge AHRC Doctoral Training Partnershi