AN APPROACH TO MACHINE DEVELOPMENT OF MUSICAL ONTOGENY

This Thesis pursues three main objectives: (i) to use computational modelling to explore how music is perceived, cognitively processed and created by human beings; (ii) to explore interactive musical systems as a method to model and achieve the transmission of musical influence in artificial worlds and between humans and machines; and (iii) to experiment with artificial and alternative developmental musical routes in order to observe the evolution of musical styles. In order to achieve these objectives, this Thesis introduces a new paradigm for the design of computer interactive musical systems called the Ontomemetical Model of Music Evolution - OMME, which includes the fields of musical ontogenesis and memetlcs. OMME-based systems are designed to artificially explore the evolution of music centred on human perceptive and cognitive faculties. The potential of the OMME is illustrated with two interactive musical systems, the Rhythmic Meme Generator (RGeme) and the Interactive Musical Environments (iMe). which have been tested in a series of laboratory experiments and live performances. The introduction to the OMME is preceded by an extensive and critical overview of the state of the art computer models that explore musical creativity and interactivity, in addition to a systematic exposition of the major issues involved in the design and implementation of these systems. This Thesis also proposes innovative solutions for (i) the representation of musical streams based on perceptive features, (ii) music segmentation, (iii) a memory-based music model, (iv) the measure of distance between musical styles, and (v) an impi*ovisation-based creative model

The 'objets sonores': Rethinking Structural Conventions in Schaeffer, Boulez, Grisey

A rethinking of the conventional strategies of musical structuring has been intensively developed since WWII. At this time, not only the rules of the codified system of tonality were overcome, but also the notion of musical sound itself as it had been conventionally intended was questioned. The note, which implies the supremacy of pitch among sound qualities, was no longer accepted as the basic element of musical language. The notion of 'sonic object' was introduced, which entails the idea that musical sound can exceed the limits defined by conventional practice and codified system, and should be considered as an object to be researched and understood, in order to exploit its full potential. The research consists of a comparative study of three musicians operating in France after WWII: Pierre Schaeffer, Pierre Boulez, and Gerard Grisey. Apart from the obvious geographical connection, they share the will to develop a new way to organise music on the basis of the accurate understanding and complete exploitation of the sonic object. The research is organised in three sections, each devoted to the study of one musician, each using his theoretical and, where possible, his musical output to clarify his thought and the reasons of his practice. However, for every specific topic of discussion, comparisons between the musicians are undertaken, so that the originality and/or inconsistency of each is highlighted by a confrontation with the others. Overall, the work shows how, notwithstanding evident superficial differences, especially in the definition and description of the sonic object, all three musicians had to confront very similar basic issues, and how the theoretical codification of any music is in fact, most of the time, a quest for a conceptual coherence which is always exceeded by musical practice

Navigating Musical Periodicities: Modes of Perception and Types of Temporal Knowledge

This dissertation explores multi-modal, symbolic, and embodied strategies for navigating musical periodicity, or “meter.” In the first half, I argue that these resources and techniques are often marginalized or sidelined in music theory and psychology on the basis of definition or context, regardless of usefulness. In the second half, I explore how expanded notions of metric experience can enrich musical analysis. I then relate them to existing approaches in music pedagogy. Music theory and music psychology commonly assume experience to be perceptual, music to be a sound object, and perception of music to mean listening. In addition, observable actions of a metaphorical “body” (and, similarly, performers’ perspectives) are often subordinate to internal processes of a metaphorical “mind” (and listeners’ experiences). These general preferences, priorities, and contextual norms have culminated in a model of “attentional entrainment” for meter perception, emerging through work by Mari Riess Jones, Robert Gjerdingen, and Justin London, and drawing upon laboratory experiments in which listeners interact with a novel sound stimulus. I hold that this starting point reflects a desire to focus upon essential and universal aspects of experience, at the expense of other useful resources and strategies (e.g. extensive practice with a particular piece, abstract ideas of what will occur, symbolic cues) Opening discussion of musical periodicity without these restrictions acknowledges experiences beyond attending, beyond listening, and perhaps beyond perceiving. I construct two categories for various resources and strategies: those which involve dynamic symbolic encoding (such as conducting patterns and tala gestures) and those which utilize static theoretical information (such as score-based knowledge and calculation of abstract relationships). My primary means of revealing and exploring these additional resources involves instances of “metric multi-tasking,” in which musicians keep track of multiple non-nested periodicities occurring simultaneously. One of the reasons these situations work so well at revealing additional resources is that attentional entrainment offers no explanation for how one might be able to do such a thing (only that attention is insufficient for the task). I do not make these moves in an attempt to significantly alter the theory of attentional entrainment. Rather, I frame that model as but one mode of temporal perception among many. I also leave room for types of temporal knowledge which may not be perceptual at all, but are nonetheless useful in situations involving musical periodicity. Pedagogical systems already make use of dynamic symbols and theoretical knowledge to help with temporally difficult tasks, and generally not virtuosic feats of metric multi-tasking. With these ideas in mind, I return to more straightforward “mono-metric” contexts and reconsider what to do with the concepts of “meter” and “perception.

Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis, 15-17 June, 2016

The Folk Music Analysis Workshop brings together computational music analysis and ethnomusicology. Both symbolic and audio representations of music are considered, with a broad range of scientific approaches being applied (signal processing, graph theory, deep learning). The workshop features a range of interesting talks from international researchers in areas such as Indian classical music, Iranian singing, Ottoman-Turkish Makam music scores, Flamenco singing, Irish traditional music, Georgian traditional music and Dutch folk songs. Invited guest speakers were Anja Volk, Utrecht University and Peter Browne, Technological University Dublin

Alessandro Scarlatti and the Italian chamber cantata

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Understanding Optical Music Recognition

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: Few introductory materials are available, and, furthermore, the field has struggled with defining itself and building a shared terminology. In this work, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, and (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords

The Clever Body

In Western civilization, we have come to regard the body as an instrument or a machine that responds to external challenges but does not have a life or creativity of its own. Thanks to some of its inherent capabilities, however, the living body can act in a highly intelligent and creative manner. All of us have noticed from time to time that our body can move naturally, without any conscious effort; it can adapt to new situational demands and propose unexpected solutions. While skiing or rock climbing or sailing, we may have abandoned ourselves to our bodily timing and responsiveness, our acute feeling for new solutions. In The Clever Body, Gabor Csepregi describes in detail the nature and scope of these innate abilities sensibility, spontaneity, mimetic faculty, sense of rhythm, memory, and imagination and reflects on their significance in human life

Computer Music Algorithms. Bio-inspired and Artificial Intelligence Applications

2014 - 2015Music is one of the arts that have most benefited from the invention of computers. Originally, the term Computer Music was used in the scientific community to identify the application of information technology in music composition. It began over time to include the theory and application of new or existing technologies in music, such as sound synthesis, sound design, acoustic, psychoacoustic. Thanks to its interdisciplinary nature, Computer Music can be seen as the encounter of different disciplines. In the last years technology has redefined the way individuals can work, communicate, share experiences, constructively debate, and actively participate to any aspect of the daily life, ranging from business to education, from political and intellectual to social, and also in music activity, such as play music, compose music and so on. In this new context, Computer Music has become an emerging research area for the application of Computational Intelligence techniques, such as machine learning, pattern recognition, bio-inspired algorithms and so on. My research activity is concerned with the Bio-inspired and Artificial Intelligence Applications in the Computer Music. Some of the problems I addressed are summarized in the following. Automatic composition of background music for games, films and other human activities: EvoBackMusic. Systems for real-time composition of background music respond to changes of the environment by generating music that matches the current state of the environment and/or of the user. We propose one such a system that we call EvoBackMusic. It is a multiagent system that exploits a feed-forward neural network and a multi-objective genetic algorithm to produce background music. The neural network is trained to learn the preferences of the user and such preferences are exploited by the genetic algorithm to compose the music. The composition process takes into account a set of controllers that describe several aspects of the environment, like the dynamism of both the user and the 2 context, other physical characteristics, and the emotional state of the user. Previous system mainly focus on the emotional aspect. Publications: • Roberto De Prisco, Delfina Malandrino, Gianluca Zaccagnino, Rocco Zaccagnino: ‘‘An Evolutionary Composer for Real-Time Background Music’’. EvoMUSART 2016: 135-151. Interaction modalities for music performances: MarcoSmiles. In this field we considered new interaction modalities during music performances by using hands without the support of a real musical instrument. Exploiting natural user interfaces (NUI), initially conceived for the game market, it is possible to enhance the traditional modalities of interaction when accessing to technology, build new forms of interactions by transporting users in a virtual dimension, but that fully reflects the reality, and finally, improve the overall perceived experience. The increasing popularity of these innovative interfaces involved their adoption in other fields, including Computer Music. We propose a system, named MarcoSmiles, specifically designed to allow individuals to perform music in an easy, innovative, and personalized way. The idea is to design new interaction modalities during music performances by using hands without the support of a real musical instrument. We exploited Artificial Neural Networks to customize the virtual musical instrument, to provide the information for the mapping of the hands configurations into musical notes and, finally, to train and test these configurations. We performed several tests to study the behavior of the system and its efficacy in terms of learning capabilities. Publications: • Roberto De Prisco, Delfina Malandrino, Gianluca Zaccagnino, Rocco Zaccagnino: ‘‘Natural Users Interfaces to support and enhance Real-Time Music Performance’’. AVI 2016. 3 Bio-inspired approach for automatic music composition Here we describe a new bio-inspired approach for automatic music composition in a specific style: Music Splicing System. Splicing systems were introduced by Tom Head (1987) as a formal model of a recombination process between DNA molecules. The existing literature on splicing systems mainly focuses on the computational power of these systems and on the properties of the generated languages; very few applications based on splicing systems have been introduced. We show a novel application of splicing systems to build an automatic music composer. As a result of a performance study we proved that our composer outperforms other meta-heuristics by producing better music according to a specific measure of quality evaluation, and this proved that the proposed system can be seen also as a new valid bio-inspired strategy for automatic music composition. Publications: ▪ Clelia De Felice, Roberto De Prisco, Delfina Malandrino, Gianluca Zaccagnino, Rocco Zaccagnino, Rosalba Zizza: ‘‘Splicing Music Composition’’. Information Sciences Journal, 385: 196 – 215 (2017). ▪ Clelia De Felice, Roberto De Prisco, Delfina Malandrino, Gianluca Zaccagnino, Rocco Zaccagnino, Rosalba Zizza: ‘‘Chorale Music Splicing System: An Algorithmic Music Composer Inspired by Molecular Splicing’’. EvoMusart 2015: 50 – 61. Music and Visualization Here we describe new approaches for learning of harmonic and melodic rules of classic music, by using visualization techniques: VisualMelody and VisualHarmony. Experienced musicians have the ability to understand the structural elements of music compositions. Such an ability is built over time through the study of music theory, the understanding of rules that guide the composition of music, and through countless hours of practice. The learning process is hard, especially for classical music, where the rigidity of the music structures and styles requires great effort to understand, assimilate, and then master the learned notions. In particular, we focused our attention on a specific type of music compositions, namely, music in chorale style (4-voice music). Composing such type of music 4 is often perceived as a difficult task, because of the rules the composer has to adhere to. In this paper we propose a visualization technique that can help people lacking a strong knowledge of music theory. The technique exploits graphic elements to draw the attention on the possible errors in the composition. We then developed two interactive systems, named VisualMelody and VisualHarmony, that employ the proposed visualization techniques to facilitate the understanding of the structure of music compositions. The aim is to allow people to make 4-voice music composition in a quick and effective way, i.e., avoiding errors, as dictated by classical music theory rules. Publications: ▪ Roberto De Prisco, Delfina Malandrino, Donato Pirozzi, Gianluca Zaccagnino, Rocco Zaccagnino: ‘‘Understanding the structure of music compositions: is visualization an effective approach?’’ Information Visualization Journal, 2016. (DOI): 10.1177/1473871616655468 • Delfina Malandrino, Donato Pirozzi, Gianluca Zaccagnino, Rocco Zaccagnino: ‘‘A Color-Based Visualization Approach to Understand Harmonic Structures of Musical Compositions’’. IV 2015: 56-61. • Delfina Malandrino, Donato Pirozzi, Gianluca Zaccagnino, Rocco Zaccagnino: ‘‘Visual Approaches for Harmonic Analysis of 4-part Music: Implementation and Evaluation’’. Major revision – Journal of Visual Languages and Computing, 2016. [edited by Author]XIV n.s