The Evaluation of Nonlinear Musical Structures

Our experience of time through music is diverse and often irregular. In Western and non-Western music, composers have explored the idea of exploiting this relationship to create structures that destabilize, fragment and even suspend time. A definition of Nonlinear Structure is proposed based upon evaluation of the level of integration, contingency, compressibility and determinacy of a work. Exemplar works by composers Earle Brown, Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen and Brian Eno are discussed

A Temporal Basis for Acousmatic Rhythm

In an attempt to begin to redress the relative lack of literature focused on rhythm in acousmatic music, this article is intended as a brief look at the acousmatic perspective on rhythm. This begins with a quick overview of discussion around rhythm in electroacoustic music more broadly, then contrasts this with some of Pierre Schaeffer's views on rhythm, and finally compares the perceptual temporal levels identified by Schaeffer with similar levels drawn from electroacoustic music, contemporary music, and cognitive psychology

Retrieving and Recreating Musical Form

Abstract. This paper discusses musical form from a cognitive and a computational viewpoint. While several time-windows exist in the brain, we here put emphasis on the superchunks of up to more than 30 seconds lengths. We compare a strategy for auditive analysis based on human cognition with a strategy for automatic analysis based on feature extraction. The feature extraction is based on the musical features rhythm, timbre and chroma. We then consider the possible consequences of this approach for the development of music generating software