Music Description and Processing: An Approach Based on Petri Nets and XML

Music description and processing require formal tools which are suitable for the representation of iteration, concurrency, ordering, hierarchy, causality, timing, synchrony, non-determinism. Petri Nets are a tool which allows to describe and process musical objects within both analysis/composition and performing environments. To accomplish this objective, a specific extension known as Music Petri Nets was developed

Complexity-entropy causality plane: a useful approach for distinguishing songs

Nowadays we are often faced with huge databases resulting from the rapid growth of data storage technologies. This is particularly true when dealing with music databases. In this context, it is essential to have techniques and tools able to discriminate properties from these massive sets. In this work, we report on a statistical analysis of more than ten thousand songs aiming to obtain a complexity hierarchy. Our approach is based on the estimation of the permutation entropy combined with an intensive complexity measure, building up the complexity-entropy causality plane. The results obtained indicate that this representation space is very promising to discriminate songs as well as to allow a relative quantitative comparison among songs. Additionally, we believe that the here-reported method may be applied in practical situations since it is simple, robust and has a fast numerical implementation.Comment: Accepted for publication in Physica

Four pieces of music with critical commentary

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The commentaries contained in this volume supplement the four pieces of chamber music I composed in my research toward the Master of Philosophy degree. Those pieces, in chronological order of completion, are It Plays You for saxophone quartet, I Am the Rose of Sharon for six voices and string trio, The Opposite of the World for eleven instruments, and Trying to get the feeling back that I had in 1972 for solo viola. The commentaries aim to establish the cultural suppositions on whose basis these pieces were conceived, the technical and aesthetic considerations that informed their composition, and the strategies by which they advance the author's critical project