A machine learning approach to voice separation in lute tablature

[TODO] Add abstract here

Exploring early vocal music and its lute arrangements: Using F-TEMPO as a musicological tool

In its earliest state, F-TEMPO (Full-Text searching of Early Music Prints Online) enabled searching in the musical content of about 30,000 page-images of early printed music from the British Library's Early Music Online collection (GB-Lbl). The images were processed using the Optical Music Recognition (OMR) program, Aruspix, whose output is saved in the MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) format. To enable fast searches of the MEI, we adopted an indexing strategy that is both scalable and substantially robust to the inevitable errors in the process. In this paper we show how searches using these indexes may be used as a first step in two useful musicological tasks without exhaustively processing the full encodings. The F-TEMPO resource has subsequently been augmented to about 500,000 images including a large number from the Bavarian State Library in Munich (D-Mbs), and other libraries (D-Bsb, PL-Wn and F-Pn). Most recently, a new and more robust system architecture is in development, together with a new interface conforming better to modern web standards. The simple, yet robust, indexing method we use can be applied to scores encoded in any format from which strings of pitches each corresponding to a voice or instrument in the score can be derived. In addition to page-images, in its current form F-TEMPO now includes a collection of over 10,000 scores encoded in MusicXML, largely of early music, from the online Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL). To show the potential for F-TEMPO as a tool for musicologists to explore the full-text content of the collections, we look at two simple tasks: (a) finding pages which contain similar music to a given query page; and (b), given a query representing an approximation to the highest-sounding voice from a lute arrangement of a popular vocal item from the 16th century, finding a likely vocal model within the F-TEMPO index

The Seventeenth-Century Battaglie for Lute in Italy

Italy had been the theatre of war for centuries. Political fragmentation ignited dynastic rivalries, carving out powerful autonomous city-states whose leaders amassed within their courts artists, musicians and writers in order to chronicle their military, religious and political vision. The musical depictions of particular military exploits, or battaglia, became popular springboards for colourful, programmatic compositions. These works were often performed in public in order to garner support for campaigns. Originally a vocal genre whose distant relative can be traced back to the caccia, or hunting song, the battaglie were often transcribed for instruments, in particular the lute, thus supplying an already extensive repertoire with a framework for new, highly original compositions expressed through the delicate idiosyncrasies of the most popular instrument. Battle pieces for solo lute found in both manuscript and published sources throughout Europe, and although they are rarely heard in concert today, they constitute a fascinating glimpse at an almost forgotten genre

Pier Francesco Valentini’s Il leuto anatomizzato (c.1650): A translation and commentary - Investigating transposition, intabulation, and other aspects of Roman lute practice. A translation of Il leuto anatomizzato - and - A contextualising essay

This research presents a translation and commentary of Il leuto anatomizzato (c.1650) by musical polymath Pier Francesco Valentini (c.1570-1654). Housed at the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Barb. Lat. 4433) yet available in modern facsimile, the manuscript has arguably been ignored by many due to its sheer complexity. Grappling with these interpretative difficulties, this essay explicates Valentini’s virtuosic account of the fretboard mechanics of transposition by any interval, relating closely (if imperfectly) to his speculative writings on equal temperament. With aesculapian rigour, Valentini also considers embellishment, basso continuo, intabulation, chord voicing, and counterpoint, illuminating the arcane musical practices of the early seventeenth-century Roman lute

The History of the Guitar

Conceived as instructional material for the guitar students at Marshall University (or anyone interested in the subject), it presents the historical process of the guitar in a clear and attainable fashion. Several topics related to the guitar will be discussed in detail throughout the book: the postulates associated with its origins, its evolution through the centuries, its repertoire, composers, performers, techniques, etc., culminating with the achievement of the privileged status of a respected concert instrument which it currently possesses

Exploring information retrieval, semantic technologies and workflows for music scholarship: the Transforming Musicology project

Transforming Musicology is a three-year project undertaking musicological research exploring state-of-the-art computational methods in the areas of early modern vocal and instrumental music (mostly for lute), Wagner’s use of leitmotifs, and music as represented in the social media. An essential component of the work involves devising a semantic infrastructure which allows research data, results and methods to be published in a form that enables others to incorporate the research into their own discourse. This includes ways of capturing the processes of musicology in the form of ‘workflows’; in principle, these allow the processes to be repeated systematically using improved data, or on newly discovered sources as they emerge. A large part of the effort of Transforming Musicology (as with any digital research) is concerned with data preparation, which in the early music case described here means dealing with the outputs of optical music recognition software, which inevitably contain errors. This report describes in outline the process of correction and some of the web-based software which has been designed to make this as easy as possible for the musicologist

A machine learning approach to voice separation in lute tablature

publicationstatus: publishedpublicationstatus: publishedpublicationstatus: publishedReinier de Valk is supported by a City University London PhD Studentship and Emmanouil Benetos is supported by a City University London Research Fellowship

An Exploration into the Use of Scordatura Tuning to Perform J. S. Bach's Partita BWV 1004 on the Guitar

J. S. Bach’s solo string and lute works have become an indispensable part of the modern guitar repertoire. While the tonal character of the modern guitar, being closely related to the Baroque guitar and lute, is fitting for Baroque performance practice, the instrument was not directly associated with Bach’s compositional idioms as he did not play it nor compose for it. Therefore, the renditions of Bach’s works on the modern guitar expose a series of technical and stylistic problems, with the majority of the problems being a result of the tuning structure of the guitar. This study investigates the use of a lute-inspired scordatura (hereinafter referred to as semi-lute scordatura) on the guitar to: (1) simplify technical difficulties by promoting the use of lower positions and open strings, (2) embody the stylistic features of the lute and harpsichord, and (3) incorporate ornamental practices from the lute and harpsichord. The Violin Partita BWV 1004 has been used in this document as a model to demonstrate the outstanding features that the semi-lute scordatura provides in these respects. The results of this study not only inform guitarists of the possibility to perform Bach’s music with scordatura tuning, but more importantly, they also expose guitarists to the lute and harpsichord style to ultimately provide essential knowledge that can be applied to create a historically-inspired rendition of Bach’s music on the guitar, even with standard tuning

Structuring lute tablature and MIDI data: Machine learning models for voice separation in symbolic music representations

This thesis concerns the design, development, and implementation of machine learning models for voice separation in two forms of symbolic music representations: lute tablature and MIDI data. Three modelling approaches are described: MA1, a note-level classification approach using a neural network, MA2, a chord-level regression approach using a neural network, and MA3, a chord-level probabilistic approach using a hidden Markov model. Furthermore, three model extensions are presented: backward processing, modelling voice and duration simultaneously, and multi-pass processing using an extended (bidirectional) decision context. Two datasets are created for model evaluation: a tablature dataset, containing a total of 15 three-voice and four-voice intabulations (lute arrangements of polyphonic vocal works) in a custom-made tablature encoding format, tab+, as well as in MIDI format, and a Bach dataset, containing the 45 three-voice and four-voice fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach’s _Das wohltemperirte Clavier_ (BWV 846-893) in MIDI format. The datasets are made available publicly, as is the software used to implement the models and the framework for training and evaluating them. The models are evaluated on the datasets in four experiments. The first experiment, where the different modelling approaches are compared, shows that MA1 is the most effective and efficient approach. The second experiment shows that the features are effective, and it demonstrates the importance of the type and amount of context information that is encoded in the feature vectors. The third experiment, which concerns model extension, shows that modelling backward and modelling voice and duration simultaneously do not lead to the hypothesised increase in model performance, but that using a multi-pass bidirectional model does. In the last experiment, where the performance of the models is compared with that of existing state-of-the-art systems for voice separation, it is shown that the models described in this thesis can compete with these systems