Running up Blueberry Hill: Prototyping whole body interaction in harmony space

Musical harmony is considered to be one of the most abstract and technically difficult parts of music. It is generally taught formally via abstract, domain-specific concepts, principles, rules and heuristics. By contrast, when harmony is represented using an existing interactive desktop tool, Harmony Space, a new, parsimonious, but equivalently expressive, unified level of description emerges. This focuses not on abstract concepts, but on concrete locations, objects, areas and trajectories. This paper presents a design study of a prototype version of Harmony Space driven by whole body navigation, and characterizes the new opportunities presented for the principled manipulation of chord sequences and bass lines. These include: deeper engagement and directness; rich physical cues for memory and reflection, embodied engagement with rhythmic time constraints; hands which are free for other simultaneous activities (such as playing a traditional instrument); and qualitatively new possibilities for collaborative use

Bach speaks: A cortical "language-network" serves the processing of music

The aim of the present study was the investigation of neural correlates of music processing with fMRI. Chord sequences were presented to the participants, infrequently containing unexpected musical events. These events activated the areas of Broca and Wernicke, the superior temporal sulcus, Heschl's gyrus, both planum polare and planum temporale, as well as the anterior superior insular cortices. Some of these brain structures have previously been shown to be involved in music processing, but the cortical network comprising all these structures has up to now been thought to be domain-specific for language processing. To what extent this network might also be activated by the processing of non-linguistic information has remained unknown. The present fMRI-data reveal that the human brain employs this neuronal network also for the processing of musical information, suggesting that the cortical network known to support language processing is less domain-specific than previously believed

Automatic estimation of harmonic tension by distributed representation of chords

The buildup and release of a sense of tension is one of the most essential aspects of the process of listening to music. A veridical computational model of perceived musical tension would be an important ingredient for many music informatics applications. The present paper presents a new approach to modelling harmonic tension based on a distributed representation of chords. The starting hypothesis is that harmonic tension as perceived by human listeners is related, among other things, to the expectedness of harmonic units (chords) in their local harmonic context. We train a word2vec-type neural network to learn a vector space that captures contextual similarity and expectedness, and define a quantitative measure of harmonic tension on top of this. To assess the veridicality of the model, we compare its outputs on a number of well-defined chord classes and cadential contexts to results from pertinent empirical studies in music psychology. Statistical analysis shows that the model's predictions conform very well with empirical evidence obtained from human listeners.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. To appear in Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research (CMMR), Porto, Portuga

On the Complex Network Structure of Musical Pieces: Analysis of Some Use Cases from Different Music Genres

This paper focuses on the modeling of musical melodies as networks. Notes of a melody can be treated as nodes of a network. Connections are created whenever notes are played in sequence. We analyze some main tracks coming from different music genres, with melodies played using different musical instruments. We find out that the considered networks are, in general, scale free networks and exhibit the small world property. We measure the main metrics and assess whether these networks can be considered as formed by sub-communities. Outcomes confirm that peculiar features of the tracks can be extracted from this analysis methodology. This approach can have an impact in several multimedia applications such as music didactics, multimedia entertainment, and digital music generation.Comment: accepted to Multimedia Tools and Applications, Springe

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

Automatic Semantic Annotation of Music with Harmonic Structure

This paper presents an annotation model for harmonic structure of a piece of music, and a rule system that supports the automatic generation of harmonic annotations. Musical structure has so far received relatively little attention in the context of musical metadata and annotation, although it is highly relevant for musicians, musicologists and indirectly for music listeners. Activities in semantic annotation of music have so far mostly concentrated on features derived from audio data and file-level metadata. We have implemented a model and rule system for harmonic annotation as a starting point for semantic annotation of musical structure. Our model is for the musical style of Jazz, but the approach is not restricted to this style. The rule system describes a grammar that allows the fully automatic creation of an harmonic analysis as tree-structured annotations. We present a prototype ontology that defines the layers of harmonic analysis from chords symbols to the level of a complete piece. The annotation can be made on music in various formats, provided there is a way of addressing either chords or time points within the music. We argue that this approach, in connection with manual annotation, can support a number of application scenarios in music production, education, and retrieval and in musicology

Towards Music Structural Segmentation across Genres: Features, Structural Hypotheses, and Annotation Principles

This work is supported by China Scholarship Council (CSC) and EPSRC project (EP/L019981/1) Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption (FAST-IMPACt). Sandler acknowledges the support of the Royal Society as a recipient of a Wolfson Research Merit Award