Introduction to Gestural Similarity in Music. An Application of Category Theory to the Orchestra

Mathematics, and more generally computational sciences, intervene in several aspects of music. Mathematics describes the acoustics of the sounds giving formal tools to physics, and the matter of music itself in terms of compositional structures and strategies. Mathematics can also be applied to the entire making of music, from the score to the performance, connecting compositional structures to acoustical reality of sounds. Moreover, the precise concept of gesture has a decisive role in understanding musical performance. In this paper, we apply some concepts of category theory to compare gestures of orchestral musicians, and to investigate the relationship between orchestra and conductor, as well as between listeners and conductor/orchestra. To this aim, we will introduce the concept of gestural similarity. The mathematical tools used can be applied to gesture classification, and to interdisciplinary comparisons between music and visual arts.Comment: The final version of this paper has been published by the Journal of Mathematics and Musi

Music symbol recognition

This paper focuses on optical music recognition (OMR) system that recognizes the musical symbols on a digitized music sheet and converts them into symbolic music representation. Two main stages are distinguished ? pre-processing and symbol analysis. In the pre-processing stage, staves are detected and removed; while in the symbol analysis stage, each musical symbol is recognized and analyzed. The musical semantics are then determined and converted into symbolic music representation stored in text form

Beyond writing: The development of literacy in the Ancient Near East

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components

A survey of computer uses in music

This thesis covers research into the mathematical basis inherent in music including review of projects related to optical character recognition (OCR) of musical symbols. Research was done about fractals creating new pieces by assigning pitches to numbers. Existing musical pieces can be taken apart and reassembled creating new ideas for composers. Musical notation understanding is covered and its requirement for the recognition of a music sheet by the computer for editing and reproduction purposes is explained. The first phase of a musical OCR was created in this thesis with the recognition of staff lines on a good quality image. Modifications will need to be made to take care of noise and tilted images that may result from scanning

Optical Music Recognition: State of the Art and Major Challenges

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is concerned with transcribing sheet music into a machine-readable format. The transcribed copy should allow musicians to compose, play and edit music by taking a picture of a music sheet. Complete transcription of sheet music would also enable more efficient archival. OMR facilitates examining sheet music statistically or searching for patterns of notations, thus helping use cases in digital musicology too. Recently, there has been a shift in OMR from using conventional computer vision techniques towards a deep learning approach. In this paper, we review relevant works in OMR, including fundamental methods and significant outcomes, and highlight different stages of the OMR pipeline. These stages often lack standard input and output representation and standardised evaluation. Therefore, comparing different approaches and evaluating the impact of different processing methods can become rather complex. This paper provides recommendations for future work, addressing some of the highlighted issues and represents a position in furthering this important field of research

Matemaattisen morfologian käyttö geometrisessa musiikinhaussa

The usual task in music information retrieval (MIR) is to find occurrences of a monophonic query pattern within a music database, which can contain both monophonic and polyphonic content. The so-called query-by-humming systems are a famous instance of content-based MIR. In such a system, the user's hummed query is converted into symbolic form to perform search operations in a similarly encoded database. The symbolic representation (e.g., textual, MIDI or vector data) is typically a quantized and simplified version of the sampled audio data, yielding to faster search algorithms and space requirements that can be met in real-life situations. In this thesis, we investigate geometric approaches to MIR. We first study some musicological properties often needed in MIR algorithms, and then give a literature review on traditional (e.g., string-matching-based) MIR algorithms and novel techniques based on geometry. We also introduce some concepts from digital image processing, namely the mathematical morphology, which we will use to develop and implement four algorithms for geometric music retrieval. The symbolic representation in the case of our algorithms is a binary 2-D image. We use various morphological pre- and post-processing operations on the query and the database images to perform template matching / pattern recognition for the images. The algorithms are basically extensions to classic image correlation and hit-or-miss transformation techniques used widely in template matching applications. They aim to be a future extension to the retrieval engine of C-BRAHMS, which is a research project of the Department of Computer Science at University of Helsinki

Recognition of handwritten music scores

The recognition of handwritten music scores still remains an open problem. The existing approaches can only deal with very simple handwritten scores mainly because of the variability in the handwriting style and the variability in the composition of groups of music notes (i.e. compound music notes). In this work on the one hand I study the isolated symbols (i.e half-note, quarter-note, clefs, sharps) and on the other hand the compound music notes. Firstly, I will separate the isolated symbols (i.e half-notes, quarter-notes, clefs, sharps) to the compounds and I will study each one separately. The isolated symbols will be recognized with symbol recognition methods and compounds with a primitive hierarchy and syntactic rules. The method has been tested using several handwritten music scores of the CVC-MUSCIMA database and compared with a commercial Optical Music Recognition software. Given that my method is learning-free, the obtained results are promising.El reconeixement de partitures musicals manuscrites segueix sent un problema obert. Els enfocaments existents només poden reconéixer partitures manuscrites molt simples, principalment a causa de la variabilitat en l'estil d'escriptura i la variabilitat en la composició dels grups de notes musicals (p.e. els símbols musicals compostos). En aquest treball, per començar, se separaran els símbols simples (p.e blanques, negres, claus, sostinguts) dels compostos i els estudiaré per separat. Els símbols simples mitjançant mètodes de reconeixement de símbols i els compostos a partir d'una jerarquia de primitives i regles sintàctiques. El meu mètode ha estat provat utilitzant diferents partitures de música escrita a mà de la base de dades CVC-MUSCIMA i comparat amb un programari de reconeixement òptic musical comercial. Tenint en compte que el meu mètode és d'aprenentatge lliure, els resultats obtinguts són prometedors.El reconocimiento de partituras musicales manuscritas sigue siendo un problema abierto. Los enfoques existentes sólo pueden reconocer partituras manuscritas muy simples, principalmente debido a la variabilidad en el estilo de escritura y la variabilidad en la composición de los grupos de notas musicales (p.e. los símbolos musicales compuestos). En este trabajo, para empezar, se separarán los símbolos simples (p.e blancas, negras, llaves, sostenidos) de los compuestos y los estudiaré por separado. Los símbolos simples mediante métodos de reconocimiento de símbolos y los compuestos a partir de una jerarquía de primitivas y reglas sintácticas. Mi método ha sido probado utilizando diferentes partituras de música escrita a mano de la base de datos CVC-MUSCIMA y comparado con un software de reconocimiento óptico musical comercial. Teniendo en cuenta que mi método es de aprendizaje libre, los resultados obtenidos son prometedores

Perspectives of electroacoustic music : a critical study of the electroacoustic music of Jonathan Harvey, Denis Smalley and Trevor Wishart.

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