"Emergence": A Piece for Wind Symphony Inspired by the Chant of the Rio Xinane, the Origins of Music, and the Geometry of Harmony

In June of 2014, the Rio Xinane (a formerly isolated tribe) emerged from the jungles of Peru onto Brazilian land to meet with Brazils National Indian Foundation (FUNAI). Their dramatic style of communication includes breaking into song with a reciting tone, as well as body slaps and stylized gestures, and points to the common origins of language, music, and dance in human communication. Summaries of Aniruddh Patels Music, Language, and the Brain and Dmitri Tymoczkos A Geometry of Music show how music, language, and movement are intertwined, and how harmony maximizes the spatial dimensions of sound. Matter in the Universe is composed of vibrations, so the vibrations of music can reflect and affect matter. Consequently, music has a pivotal role to play in education and in health. Inspired by this research, Emergence, a piece for wind symphony, is a response to the beauty of Rio Xinane communication, composed within the framework of traditional Western harmony

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Music Structure

PhDMusic signal analysis is a research field concerning the extraction of meaningful information from musical audio signals. This thesis analyses the music signals from the note-level to the song-level in a bottom-up manner and situates the research in two Music information retrieval (MIR) problems: audio onset detection (AOD) and music structural segmentation (MSS). Most MIR tools are developed for and evaluated on Western music with specific musical knowledge encoded. This thesis approaches the investigated tasks from a cross-cultural perspective by developing audio features and algorithms applicable for both Western and non-Western genres. Two Chinese Jingju databases are collected to facilitate respectively the AOD and MSS tasks investigated. New features and algorithms for AOD are presented relying on fusion techniques. We show that fusion can significantly improve the performance of the constituent baseline AOD algorithms. A large-scale parameter analysis is carried out to identify the relations between system configurations and the musical properties of different music types. Novel audio features are developed to summarise music timbre, harmony and rhythm for its structural description. The new features serve as effective alternatives to commonly used ones, showing comparable performance on existing datasets, and surpass them on the Jingju dataset. A new segmentation algorithm is presented which effectively captures the structural characteristics of Jingju. By evaluating the presented audio features and different segmentation algorithms incorporating different structural principles for the investigated music types, this thesis also identifies the underlying relations between audio features, segmentation methods and music genres in the scenario of music structural analysis.China Scholarship Council EPSRC C4DM Travel Funding, EPSRC Fusing Semantic and Audio Technologies for Intelligent Music Production and Consumption (EP/L019981/1), EPSRC Platform Grant on Digital Music (EP/K009559/1), European Research Council project CompMusic, International Society for Music Information Retrieval Student Grant, QMUL Postgraduate Research Fund, QMUL-BUPT Joint Programme Funding Women in Music Information Retrieval Grant

Investigating the build-up of precedence effect using reflection masking

The auditory processing level involved in the build‐up of precedence [Freyman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 874–884 (1991)] has been investigated here by employing reflection masked threshold (RMT) techniques. Given that RMT techniques are generally assumed to address lower levels of the auditory signal processing, such an approach represents a bottom‐up approach to the buildup of precedence. Three conditioner configurations measuring a possible buildup of reflection suppression were compared to the baseline RMT for four reflection delays ranging from 2.5–15 ms. No buildup of reflection suppression was observed for any of the conditioner configurations. Buildup of template (decrease in RMT for two of the conditioners), on the other hand, was found to be delay dependent. For five of six listeners, with reflection delay=2.5 and 15 ms, RMT decreased relative to the baseline. For 5‐ and 10‐ms delay, no change in threshold was observed. It is concluded that the low‐level auditory processing involved in RMT is not sufficient to realize a buildup of reflection suppression. This confirms suggestions that higher level processing is involved in PE buildup. The observed enhancement of reflection detection (RMT) may contribute to active suppression at higher processing levels