A Striking Effect: Chromatic Techniques in Baroque Variation Sets and Their Relationship to Late Madrigals

One of the most widely used approaches in tonal music, variation technique has informed centuries of composition. Beginning with Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, the Baroque keyboard variation set was a prominent form; one particular multimovement variation set, commonly called the “partita,” included various treatments of a given theme, sacred or secular, in a display of compositional variety. One treatment occurs with some regularity and involves a harmonization of a chorale tune in which chromaticism is pervasive, having a non-diatonic note on every beat or including key areas that are more distant than was customary. This dissertation explores the chromatic variation with one broad question: how is this chromaticism generated? Are there particular aspects of a chorale melody that give rise to this treatment? What are the main compositional techniques that constitute a chromatic movement? Using detailed analyses of four pieces—Johann Sebastian Bach, O Gott du frommer Gott, BWV 767/7; Johann Pachelbel, Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan, variation 4; Pachelbel, Alle Menschen müßen sterben, var. 7; and Samuel Scheidt, Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund, verse 6—I find six unifying principles that contribute to the chromatic nature of these movements. Then, using Pachelbel’s two movements as models, I compose chromatic variations on two chorale tunes, Freu’ dich sehr, o meine Seele and Jesu, meine Freude, which did not previously receive such treatment; the six principles are used to inform my own composition, and this exercise is a way to test the efficacy of those principles. Finally, a precedent for this high level of chromaticism is sought in the late-sixteenth-century madrigal, using several Italian and English pieces to draw a connection to the Baroque music that followed in the next century and a half

“What Is the Basic Rule of Outside”? : The Construction of a Jazz Improvisation Concept in On-line Environments

Jazz musicians often talk about the changes, referring to the chord sequences of a tune. The changes are the harmonic framework for improvisations, and as such they govern what the appropriate note choices are for improvising over a tune.The changes involve a strong connection between chords and scales, and these two are often understood as vertical vs. horizontal representations of the same tonal material. A musician can, depending on style, personal preferences etc., choose to follow or not to follow these tonal boundaries, improvising either inside the changes or outside the changes. Most of the scholarly writings on jazz have studied aspects of inside playing, such as harmonic-melodic structures and relationships. These boundaries are often understood as rules that govern the tonal content of jazz improvisation. Therefore, a simplified explanation would be to say that to obey these rules is to play inside, and to break them is to play outside. The research question this study attempts to answer is: What is outside said to be in on-line environments? And following that question: How is outside manifested in the recorded jazz improvisations that are used by the online writers to exemplify outside? The term ‘outside’ is commonly used by jazz musicians playing in a post-bop idiom, but despite its frequent use in musicians’ jargon there is no set or standardized definition for it. Using an approach grounded in discourse analysis, I study how the term ‘outside’ is constructed and what attributes are assigned to it. The research material used for analysis consists of posts from online forums, along with online lessons and blog posts. I also apply music analysis to the music examples found in these posts to identify how outside is performed in practice. The study shows that the concept of outside, as it is explained in the online material, cannot be understood without considering its rule-based opposite, inside. Thus, outside is not a direct synonym to terms such as free improvisation, polytonality or atonality but a musical phenomenon in its own right. As the concept is constructed in the research material, outside concerns tonal tension; it does not involve breaking rhythmic, timbral or stylistic boundaries. Certain performance characteristics are as central in outside playing as they are in jazz improvisation in general: playing with good sound; with rhythmic drive and stability; and with confidence and conviction. Finally, there seems to be a collection of rules that govern how, where and when an improviser can break rules of inside in order to achieve outside. These new rules govern how a jazz musician can break the old rules.“Vad är den grundläggande regeln för outside?” Hur ett begrepp inom jazzimprovisation skapas i internet-miljöer. Jazzmusiker talar ofta om the changes, och avser då ackordföljden i en låt. The changes utgör det harmoniska ramverket för musikernas improvisationer, och reglerar vilka toner som passar att spela under ett improviserat solo. The changes är nära knutet till begreppen ’skala’ och ’ackord’ och den starka kopplingen dem emellan, eftersom skalor och ackord ofta ses som vertikala respektive horisontala representationer av ett och samma tonala innehåll. En musiker kan, beroende på stil, personliga preferenser etc., välja att följa eller att inte följa dessa tonala ramar, och improvisera innanför (inside) eller utanför (outside) the changes. De flesta studier kring jazz som musik har fokuserat på aspekter kring spel innanför de tonala gränserna, såsom analyser av harmoniska strukturer och harmonisk-melodiska förhållanden. Dessa ramar uppfattas ofta som regler som styr det tonala innehållet i jazzimprovisation. Att följa reglerna är att spela inside, medan att bryta mot reglerna är att spela outside. Begreppet outside är vanligt förekommande i vokabulären bland jazzmusiker som spelar i ett post-bop idiom, men trots att ordet ofta används saknas en bestämd, allmänt accepterad definition. Genom att använda ett förhållningssätt som utgår från diskursanalysens metoder studerar jag hur begreppet outside konstrueras och vilka attribut som tillskrivs begreppet. Det empiriska materialet utgörs av inlägg från olika internetforum, tillsammans med blogginlägg och online-lektioner. Jag tillämpar även musikanalys på de musikexempel som nämns i materialet, för att identifiera hur outside spelas i praktiken. Denna studie visar att begreppet outside, så som det förklaras i online-materialet, inte kan förstås utan sin motsats, inside. Sålunda är outside inte en synonym till begrepp som fri improvisation, polytonalitet eller atonalitet, utan ett musikaliskt begrepp som står på egna ben. Outside konstrueras i materialet som ett begrepp som rör tonal spänning: att överskrida rytmiska, klangmässiga eller stilistiska ramar ingår inte i begreppet. Vissa element som rör framförandet är lika centrala för outside-spel som de är för improvisation i allmänhet. Hit hör att spela med bra klang och sound, med rytmiskt driv och stabilitet, och att spela med övertygelse och självförtroende. Studien visar att det finns en uppsättning regler som styr hur, var och när en improvisatör kan bryta mot reglerna för inside-spel, för att därigenom spela outside. Dessa nya regler styr hur en jazzmusiker kan bryta de gamla reglerna

Exploring the Chromatic Harmony and Tonal Organization of Casey Crescenzo

Much of western music harmony study considers repertoire only from the classical canon and so-called jazz standards. While this pursuit is noble, much more can be gleaned from musical theoretical study expanding the repertoire into progressive rock. Prog has pioneered the modern usage of chromatic harmony, especially 4ths-based movement, and subdominant harmony, as well as the natural expansion of the ideas of chromatic mediants and transformational theory. This paper specifically highlights the usages of these extended harmonic techniques in the music of Casey Crescenzo, primary writer/composer for the rock band: The Dear Hunter

Fundamentals, Function, and Form: Theory and Analysis of Tonal Western Art Music

Fundamentals, Function, and Form by Andre Mount—with editorial and pedagogical input from Lee Rothfarb—provides its readers with a comprehensive study of the theory and analysis of tonal Western art music. Mount begins by building a strong foundation in the understanding of rhythm, meter, and pitch as well as the notational conventions associated with each. From there, he guides the reader through an exploration of polyphony—the simultaneous sounding of multiple independent melodies—and an increasingly rich array of different sonorites that grow out of this practice. The book culminates with a discussion of musical form, engaging with artistic works in their entirety by considering the interaction of harmonic and thematic elements, but also such other musical dimensions as rhythm, meter, texture, and expression. Along the way, Mount supplements the text with over eight hundred musical examples which, in the online version of the text, include embedded audio files for immediate aural reinforcement of theoretical concepts. Most of these examples are drawn from the literature, including nearly 200 excerpts by women and other underrepresented groups. The reader is also given the opportunity to check their understanding of the text with interactive exercises at every step of the way. Fundamentals, Function, and Form was written with the undergraduate music student in mind, but self-guided readers would also be rewarded with a deep understanding of this musical tradition.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/oer-ost/1027/thumbnail.jp

Schenker, Schubert, and the Subtonic Chord

A close reading and critique of Heinrich Schenker’s treatment of the subtonic chord (for example, B♭-D-F in C major or C minor) serves as the foundation for a detailed assessment of the diverse contexts in which it was employed by Franz Schubert. Numerous analyses of musical excerpts by Schubert help to reveal the relationship between the subtonic chord and the dominant Stufe (scale-step) and to demonstrate various linear contexts in which it may arise. Although the chord often is labeled as VII in C minor or as ♭VII in C major, its subsidiary role within the projection or connection of more foundational Stufen warrants a less overtly harmonic interpretation. This article is part of a special, serialized feature: A Music-Theoretical Matrix: Essays in Honor of Allen Forte (Part II)

Probabilistic models of contextual effects in Auditory Pitch Perception

Perception was recognised by Helmholtz as an inferential process whereby learned expectations about the environment combine with sensory experience to give rise to percepts. Expectations are flexible, built from past experiences over multiple time-scales. What is the nature of perceptual expectations? How are they learned? How do they affect perception? These are the questions I propose to address in this thesis. I focus on two important yet simple perceptual attributes of sounds whose perception is widely regarded as effortless and automatic : pitch and frequency. In a first study, I aim to propose a definition of pitch as the solution of a computational goal. Pitch is a fundamental and salient perceptual attribute of many behaviourally important sounds including speech and music. The effortless nature of its perception has led to the search for a direct physical correlate of pitch and for mechanisms to extract pitch from peripheral neural responses. I propose instead that pitch is the outcome of a probabilistic inference of an underlying periodicity in sounds given a learned statistical prior over naturally pitch-evoking sounds, explaining in a single model a wide range of psychophysical results. In two other psychophysical studies I study how and at what time-scales recent sensory history affects the perception of frequency shifts and pitch shifts. (1) When subjects are presented with ambiguous pitch shifts (using octave ambiguous Shepard tone pairs), I show that sensory history is used to leverage the ambiguity in a way that reflects expectations of spectro-temporal continuity of auditory scenes. (2) In delayed 2 tone frequency discrimination tasks, I explore the contraction bias : when asked to report which of two tones separated by brief silence is higher, subjects behave as though they hear the earlier tone ’contracted’ in frequency towards a combination of recently presented stimulus frequencies, and the mean of the overall distribution of tones used in the experiment. I propose that expectations - the statistical learning of the sampled stimulus distribution - are built online and combined with sensory evidence in a statistically optimal fashion. Models derived in the thesis embody the concept of perception as unconscious inference. The results support the view that even apparently primitive acoustic percepts may derive from subtle statistical inference, suggesting that such inferential processes operate at all levels across our sensory systems

A Model for Pitch Estimation Using Wavelet Packet Transform Based CEPSTRUM Method

A computationally efficient model for pitch estimation of mixed audio signals is presented. Pitch estimation plays a significant role in music audition like music information retrieval, automatic music transcription, melody extraction etc. The proposed system consists of channel separation and periodicity detection. The input signal is created by mixing two sound signals. First removes the short time correlations of the mixed signal. The model divides the signal into number of channels using wavelet packet transform. Computes the cepstrum of each channels and sums the cepstrum functions. The summary cepstrum function is further processed to extract the pitch frequency of two input signal separately. The model performance is demonstrated to be comparable to those of recent multichannel models. The proposed system can be verified by simulating the system in MATLAB

Bridging the Gap: An Introduction to Jazz Improvisation and the Application of Manipulating Composed Content for Classical Percussionists

This document presents a systematic study of an introductory method to jazz improvisation for classical percussionists. This method discusses a combination of fundamental concepts of jazz improvisation, combined with the approaches of applying these concepts as a way of manipulating composed content. This methodology provides classical percussionists with an appropriate vehicle to bridge their knowledge from through-composed, and classical music, to jazz improvisation. The concepts, along with an analysis of their application, is detailed in each chapter with extensive musical examples

Real-time Sound Source Separation For Music Applications

Sound source separation refers to the task of extracting individual sound sources from some number of mixtures of those sound sources. In this thesis, a novel sound source separation algorithm for musical applications is presented. It leverages the fact that the vast majority of commercially recorded music since the 1950s has been mixed down for two channel reproduction, more commonly known as stereo. The algorithm presented in Chapter 3 in this thesis requires no prior knowledge or learning and performs the task of separation based purely on azimuth discrimination within the stereo field. The algorithm exploits the use of the pan pot as a means to achieve image localisation within stereophonic recordings. As such, only an interaural intensity difference exists between left and right channels for a single source. We use gain scaling and phase cancellation techniques to expose frequency dependent nulls across the azimuth domain, from which source separation and resynthesis is carried out. The algorithm is demonstrated to be state of the art in the field of sound source separation but also to be a useful pre-process to other tasks such as music segmentation and surround sound upmixing