Identifying master violinists using note-level audio features

The same piece of music can be performed in various styles by different performers. Vibrato plays an important role in violin players' emotional expression, and it is an important factor of playing style while execution shows great diversity. Expressive timing is also an important factor to reflect individual play styles. In our study, we construct a novel dataset, which contains 15 concertos performed by 9 master violinists. Four vibrato features and one timing feature are extracted from the data, and we present a method based on the similarity of feature distribution to identify violinists using each feature alone and fusion of features. The result shows that vibrato features are helpful for the identification, but the timing feature performs better, yielding a precision of 0.751. In addition, although the accuracy obtained from fused features are lower than using timing alone, discrimination for each performer is improved

Transnational Communities through Global Tourism: Experiencing Celtic Culture through Music Practice on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia

Thesis (PhD) - Indiana University, Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2008How are transnational communities experienced? What types of social interactions constitute transnational communities? Specifically, can a sense of transnational community be expressed and experienced through participation in cultural music performances? Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, is currently the heart of the North Atlantic Celtic music revival. Fueled by a booming tourism industry, efforts in cultural preservation, and claims as a last stronghold of Gaelic speakers outside Scotland, Cape Breton Island is an international gathering place for tourists and performers to encounter the larger community of Celtic musicians. This ethnography of a transnational music community explores the ways in which geographically disparate peoples encounter the transnational Celtic music community, learn what it means to belong, and through participation, become full members in the community. I argue that the transnational Celtic music community is best described as a community of practice, where members are active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities in relation to these communities. The role of international tourism, traditional arts schools, festivals, and interactive websites are examined through the lens of phenomenology and performance theory. Although primary research is based in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, field research extends to Scotland, Canada, and the United States, in order to examine the increasingly complex circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities of human inter-connectedness. Issues raised in this case study are cross-disciplinary in nature and can be applied broadly to research on globalization, international relations, and diasporic communities. More specifically, this research contributes directly to the field of ethnomusicology, folklore, performance theory, and tourism studies

Ón gCos go Cluas : From Dancing to Listening

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Irish music in central Oklahoma: An ethnographic study.

Based mainly on fieldwork conducted in the Oklahoma City and Norman areas over a three-and-a-half year span (2002--2006), the research material for this dissertation has been gathered primarily through the author's observations as a participant in the Irish jam session held monthly at various places in the Oklahoma City and Norman areas, informal conversations, and planned and structured interviews with other participating session musicians. Information gathered from each interviewee included how musical skills were learned, circumstances under which he/she first encountered Irish music, experiences with other music genres, differences between Irish music and old-time or bluegrass music, appealing factors for his/her involvement in jam sessions, and family ethnic heritage.Musical activities in the United States traditionally associated with ethnic minorities are becoming increasingly popular among native-born Americans. Irish music, traditionally served as the cultural reminder for the Irish immigrant community, has in recent years been greatly enjoyed by the wider non-Irish-born American population. This dissertation is an ethnographic study of Irish music in Oklahoma, a locale that is relatively distant from cities that are recognized as having high concentrations of Irish immigrant population, such as New York, Boston, or Chicago.The survey of the various contexts of Irish music practices in Central Oklahoma in Chapter 5, the close examination of the blooming Irish jam sessions in the Oklahoma City and Norman areas in Chapter 6, and the case studies of individual musicians in Chapter 7 inform us of the cultural conditions in the American mid-West; ethnic musical activities, such as the Irish session serves not only as a reminder of the cultural identity of the particular ethnic group, but also offer a broader meaning in the social context of post-modern America. Irish music in Oklahoma, far removed from its original homeland, becomes a means by which native-born Americans find communities, roots and traditions, ethnic identities, or simple pleasures of learning and playing a musical instrument

Crossing Over : Fiddle and Dance Studies from around the North Atlantic 3

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Traditional Irish Musical Elements in the Solo-Piano Music of Ryan Molloy

Music in Ireland has become increasingly popular in recent decades. There is no shortage of Irish musical groups, recordings, and live performances featuring Irish music both in Ireland and abroad. Contemporary art music in Ireland has also seen an increase in support and notoriety. Irish composers face a decision of how, if at all, to engage with traditional folk music that is so prominent in their culture. Ryan Molloy (b. 1983 in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland) is a composer and performer who incorporates elements of traditional Irish music in the context and in the language of modern art music. Molloy received a childhood education in both traditional Irish music and in classical piano. He is fluent with both of these musical languages, which gives him a unique perspective and cultural context. This dissertation explores the way in which Ryan Molloy uses traditional musical elements and recontextualizes them in his solo-piano works. Chapter One provides background information about the recent history of Irish art music. Chapter Two provides a brief biography of Molloy and presents some of his chief compositional goals and purposes. Chapter Three introduces basic concepts of traditional Irish music. Chapter Four presents Molloy’s solo-piano works and discusses how he uses the music of his traditional heritage. The appendices include a chronological list of Molloy’s compositions as well as transcripts of interviews of Molloy by the author. Molloy’s music continues to grow in prominence both in Ireland and abroad. His perspective generates a music language that is fresh and innovative. His music, which draws upon two seemingly opposing worlds, deserves increased performance and research

A Study in Violinist Identification using Short-term Note Features

The perception of music expression and emotion are greatly influenced by performer's individual interpretation, thus modelling performer's style is important to music understanding, style transfer, music education and characteristic music generation. This Thesis proposes approaches for modelling and identifying musical instrumentalists, using violinist identification as a case study. In violin performance, vibrato and timbre play important roles in players’ emotional expression, and they are key factors of playing style while execution shows great diversity. To validate that these two factors are effective to model violinists, we design and extract note-level vibrato features and timbre features from isolated concerto music notes, then present a violinist identification method based on the similarity of feature distributions, using single feature as well as fused features. The result shows that vibrato features are helpful for the violinist identification, and some timbre features perform better than vibrato features. In addition, the accuracy obtained from fused features is higher than using any single feature. However, apart from performer, the timbre is also determined by musical instruments, recording conditions and other factors. Furthermore, the common scenario for violinist identification is based on short music clips rather than isolated notes. To solve these two problems, we further examine the method using note-level timbre features to recognize violinists from segmented solo music clips, then use it to identify master players from concerto fragments. The results show that the designed features and method work very well for both types of music. Another experiment is conducted to examine the influence of instrument on the features. Results suggest that the selected timbre features can model performers’ individual playing reasonably and objectively, regardless of the instrument they play. Expressive timing is another key factor to reflect individual play styles. This Thesis develops a novel onset time deviation feature, which is used to model and identify master violinists on concerto fragments data. Results show that it performs better than timbre features on the dataset. To generalise the violinist identification method and further improve the result, deep learning methods are proposed and investigated. We present a transfer learning approach for violinist identification from pre-trained music auto-tagging neural networks and singer identification models. We then transfer pre-trained weights and fine-tune the models using violin datasets and finally obtain violinist identification results. We compare our system with state-of-the-art works, which shows that our model outperforms them using our two datasets

Getting into the Irish groove: dancing in Boston Irish music sessions

Thesis (M.M.)--Boston UniversityIrish music sessions are informal performance spaces meant for musicians to create music for listening. The repertoire of this music tradition, however, is composed of dance music. In Boston, there is a group of Irish dancers who attend music sessions, seeking out live music performance with which they can dance. In these live performances, musicians and dancers have the opportunity to create collaborative and mutually meaningful performances. In my research, I explore the nature of collaborative performance between musicians and dancers in Boston Irish music sessions through an investigation of social relationships, participatory expectations, and performance elements like tempo, instrumentation, rhythm and dance style. Dancers are performing an improvisatory genre of Irish dance known as sean nos as a method of achieving successful collaborative performances with live musicians. The success of a music session is measured by the musicians' likelihood and ability to experience groove. A successful collaboration between music and dancers is measured against this same experiential goal. In some circumstances, the experience of groove leads to the experience of flow

Change and stability in Irish-American-Newfoundland fiddle tunes

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