Musicologists and Data Scientists Pull out all the Stops: Defining Renaissance Cadences Systematically

Digital tools offer many ways to find musical patterns with machines. But the task of formulating digital-musical queries systematically, interpreting the results, and refining our methods to yield intelligent insights about musical practice is far more difficult. In this presentation, a team of musicologists and data scientists will share our experiences in developing CRIM Intervals, a Python-Pandas toolkit designed to support Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass, modeling human expertise in terms that can be used by computers to analyze encoded musical scores, and presenting the results of automated score-reading in forms that scholars can interrogate and refine. This presentation explains how we developed these tools, from understanding the constraints that define a given musical event, to the development of the tools needed to model those constraints, and in turn to the stages of refinement needed to eliminate false negatives and positives

Machine learning of symbolic compositional rules with genetic programming: dissonance treatment in Palestrina

We describe a method for automatically extracting symbolic compositional rules from music corpora. Resulting rules are expressed by a combination of logic and numeric relations, and they can therefore be studied by humans. These rules can also be used for algorithmic composition, where they can be combined with each other and with manually programmed rules. We chose genetic programming (GP) as our machine learning technique, because it is capable of learning formulas consisting of both logic and numeric relations. GP was never used for this purpose to our knowledge. We therefore investigate a well understood case in this study: dissonance treatment in Palestrina’s music. We label dissonances with a custom algorithm, automatically cluster melodic fragments with labelled dissonances into different dissonance categories (passing tone, suspension etc.) with the DBSCAN algorithm, and then learn rules describing the dissonance treatment of each category with GP. Learning is based on the requirement that rules must be broad enough to cover positive examples, but narrow enough to exclude negative examples. Dissonances from a given category are used as positive examples, while dissonances from other categories, melodic fragments without dissonances, purely random melodic fragments, and slight random transformations of positive examples, are used as negative examples

Big Music Data, Musicology, and the Study of Recorded Music: Three Case Studies

This paper considers some of the interactions between Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and musicology, particularly in relation to Big Music Data and the analysis of recorded music. Since MIR is still not widely recognized within the musicological community, and the possible insights offered by analyzing Big Music Data even less so, the paper both briefly contextualizes some of this work for a musicological readership and provides three specific case studies that illustrate concrete musicological outcomes. These relate to: changing orchestral pitch over time; pulse salience beyond the EuroAmerican classical music tradition; and changing performance tempi in classical music. The paper concludes by considering some broader conceptual issues that arise from the relationship between Big Music Data, musicology and recorded music

Writing absolute music: modernity's linguistic symphony

Writing Absolute Music: Modernity's Linguistic Symphony explores one facet of the relationship between music and language in 19th- and 20th-century German literature and philosophy. By examining the vital role that the idea of absolute music has played in works by thinkers and authors such as Novalis, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hermann Hesse, I argue that the somewhat counterintuitive phenomenon of writing about music in order to overcome problems associated with language originates in early German Romanticism and continues to influence German authors throughout the first half of the 20th century. Focusing in large part on Hesse's masterpiece, Das Glasperlenspiel, I establish that authors who seek to overcome language's inherent limitations and approach a transcendental reality by emulating musical structures in their novels and short stories ultimately fail to achieve their fundamental goal. I demonstrate that Hesse is the last great heir to this Romantic legacy and that the failure of Das Glasperlenspiel to access an absolute through words explains the shift in German literature around 1950 away from the Romantic ideal of turning language into music toward a less optimistic, more humble depiction of music's role within works of German literature

Troubling textualities: insubordinate politics and conflicted complicity in the work of Kathy Acker (1978-1988)

Kathy Acker (1937-1997) was a celebrated experimental writer, who found a striking degree of commercial and critical success in the mid-1980s. Born and primarily based in the U.S., Acker managed to trace a creative and professional trajectory across the Atlantic, becoming an esteemed author - and often, a minor celebrity - both in the U.S. and in the U.K. Her book-length, novelistic experiments challenged the tenets of the contemporary novel, powerfully subverting encoded expectations and dominant definitions of narrative form, of authorial intent, and of literary creativity. Often grouped with post-modernist contemporaries, Acker's work both expresses something of that historical moment and surprises its convened temporality, producing imaginative pathways across various counter-traditions of innovative and oppositional literature. Variously described as pornographic, feminist, plagiaristic, violent, transformative, queer, punk, bad or derivative, her writing holds a compelling force of its own, and attests to a distinctive ethos of transgression. This project departs from extant understandings of Acker's work and the various ways it has been valued and rememorated across time - especially as the anniversary of both her birth and her death was celebrated in 2017. Recognizing these more recent processes of recollection and rememoration across various media and discursive contexts, this project unequivocally situates itself amidst an ongoing reassessment of the capacities and potentialities of Acker's body of work. However, unlike most contemporary discussions of Acker's writing, this project holds that her standing as a radically committed writer demands increased – rather than decreased – scrutiny into the more normative impulses of her work. While emphasizing the multiple ways her writing disrupted normalized structures of meaning and understanding, we must also probe into those moments where it reiterated, repeated, and reasserted the political fictions of hegemony and dominion. Three categories prove indispensable to this confrontation with the defining limits of Acker’s work: race, gender, and sexuality. With a strong intersectional emphasis, the present project suggests readings of three of Acker's novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), Blood and Guts in High School (1984) and Empire of the Senseless (1988). Tracing a comparative critical trajectory across the three texts, it evinces the inevitable contradictions of Acker's writing, and attempts to widen the scope of present conversations about the politics and poetics of her work.Kathy Acker (1937-1997) foi uma autora experimental celebrada, que encontrou um surpreendente grau de sucesso comercial e crítico em meados dos anos 80. Nascida e primariamente baseada nos Estados Unidos, Acker conseguiu traçar uma trajectória criativa e profissional através do Atlântico, tornando-se uma autora estimada – e muitas vezes, uma celebridade menor – tanto nos Estados Unidos como no Reino Unido. As suas experiências com o formato do romance desafiaram os fundamentos do romance contemporâneo, poderosamente subvertendo expectativas codificadas e definições dominantes de forma narrativa, de intenção autoral, e de criatividade literária. Frequentemente agrupada com autores pós-modernistas seus contemporâneos, a obra de Acker simultaneamente expressa algo desse momento histórico e surpreende a sua temporalidade convencional, produzindo percursos imaginativos através de diversas contra-tradições de literatura inovadora e oposicional. Variavelmente descrita enquanto pornográfica, feminista, plagiária, violenta, transformativa, queer, punk, má ou derivativa, a sua escrita mantém uma força própria, e expressa uma distintiva ética da transgressão. Este projecto parte de leituras existentes do trabalho de Acker, e dos vários modos pelos quais este tem sido valorizado e rememorado ao longo do tempo – especialmente com as celebrações do aniversário do seu nascimento e da sua morte, em 2017. Reconhecendo processos mais recentes de memorialização através de diversos media e contextos discursivos, este projecto situa-se inequivocamente num debate em curso, pelo qual se reconsideram as capacidades e potencialidades da sua obra. No entanto, ao contrário da maioria das discussões contemporâneas sobre a escrita de Acker, mantemos que a localização da autora enquanto uma escritora radicalmente comprometida exige escrutínio acrescido – e não reduzido – sobre os impulsos mais normativos da sua obra. Conforme enfatizamos os múltiplos meios pelos quais a sua escrita perturbou estruturas normativas de sentido e interpretação, devemos prestar especial atenção àqueles momentos em que esta mesma repete, reitera e reafirma as ficções políticas da hegemonia e do domínio. Três categorias são cucais para este confronto com os limites constitutivos do trabalho de Acker: a raça, a o género, e a sexualidade. Com uma marcada ênfase interseccional, o presente projecto avança leituras de três romances da autora: Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), Blood and Guts in High School (1984) e Empire of the Senseless (1988). Traçando criticamente uma trajectória comparativa através dos três textos, expomos as inevitáveis contradições próprias à escrita de Acker, e procuramos ampliar o escopo de discussões actuais sobre a sua agência política e poética

Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Discovery, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity

This dissertation analyzes the paradigms Christian writers (150-500 C.E.) used to array, historicize, and polemicize ethnographic data. A study of late antique heresiological literature (orthodox treatises about heretics) demonstrates how the religious practices, doctrinal beliefs, and historical origins of heretics served to define Christian schematizations of the world. In studying heretics, Christian authors defined and ordered the bounds of Christian knowledge and the process by which that knowledge was transmitted

The long necked lute’s eternal return: Mythology, morphology, iconography of the Tanbūr Lute family from Ancient Mesopotamia to Ottoman Albania

Musical instruments exist as both material and imaginal cultural objects. This Thesis explores the intersection of these modes of being as pertaining to long necked lutes of the tanbūr type and asks, what effect do cultural intangibles like mythology and cosmology have on the physical design of these lutes? I have incorporated the biological theory of phylogenetics, to define the material aspects of the tanbūr family and its genera, and the philosophical theory of the rhizome, to conceptualize cultural intangibles. I first examine the earliest known lutes from ancient Mesopotamia and follow their morphological development to the 1st millennium CE tanbūr to the Ottoman-era Albanian çifteli. I find them enmeshed in mytho-cosmological complex centered on the semidivine Dumuzi, the shepherd king, and his wife the goddess Inanna. On the ‘paternal’, Dumuzi-d side, these ancient long necked lutes belong to the courtly instrumentarium, performed in royal banquets to accompany narrative songs that reinforce and illustrate Mesopotamian kingship ideology. On the ‘maternal’ side, Inanna’s domain, the lutes are played by either a shepherd king figure, a marginalized man who Inanna elevates through her intercession, or by masculine warriors and common soldiers who Inanna leads to victory in battle. These three characters—shepherd king, woman of authority, and long necked lute—and the dynamics between them form a rhizomatic complex that is the basis of a key theme in Return songs like Odyssey, ‘Bamsi Beyrek’, and the Albanian Aga Imer. The Return songs’ ‘shouting’ theme replicates in miniature all the essential elements of the original Mesopotamian complex, demonstrating that this complex defines these long necked lute genera as much as their morphology. Textual and iconographic evidence suggests that socially these lute genera of the tanbūr family become popular in the Balkans through Anatolia in the course of the late Byzantine (after 12th century) and the Ottoman Empires,1 apparently transmitted via a Frontier Warrior Culture who used them to accompany Return songs, that were in turn built around common experiences of these irregular border forces. The shouting theme of Aga Imer incorporates the çifteli in a manner that rhizomatically links it to the Turkmën epic of Crazy Harman and the ‘black two stringed (dutār), and through the latter’s Sufic and shamanic exegesis I explore the cosmological ideas implicit in Aga Imer as a manifestation of the generic Return song and the çifteli as a representative of the tanbūr family. I then interpret the çifteli’s morphology as an expression of this mythocosmological rhizome, and demonstrate the integrity of both morphology and cosmology in their long sojourn from ancient Mesopotamia to modern day Albania

Sexuated Topology and the Suspension of Meaning: A Non-Hermeneutical Phenomenological Approach to Textual Analysis

This study assumes the subject's pursuit of meaning is generally incapacitating and should be suspended. It aims to demonstrate how such a suspension is theoretically accomplished by utilizing Lacan's formulae of sexuation integrated with his work in discourse theory and topology. Part I places this study into context by examining scholarship from the established fields of hermeneutics, phenomenology, (post)structuralism, aesthetic theory and psychoanalysis in order to extract out their respective theory of meaning. These theories reveal that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation and reaches near crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand this crisis is mollified by the rise of Heideggerian-Gadamerian hermeneutical phenomenology which questions traditional epistemological approaches to the text using a new ontological conceptualization of meaning and a conscious rejection of methodology. On the other hand this crisis is exacerbated when the ubiquitous nature of meaning is itself challenged by (post)structuralism's discovery of the signifier which inscribes a limit to meaning, and by the domains of sense and nonsense newly opened up by aesthetic theory. These historical developments culminate in the field of psychoanalysis which most consequentially delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Part II extends these findings by rigorously constructing out of the Lacanian sexuated formulae a decidedly non-hermeneutical phenomenological approach useful in demonstrating the sexual nature of meaning. Explicated in their static state by way of an account of their original derivation from the Aristotelian logical square, it is argued that these four formulae are relevant to basic concerns of textual theory inclusive of the hermeneutical circle of meaning. These formulae are then set into motion by integrating them with Lacan's four discourses to demonstrate the breakdown of meaning. Finally, the cuts and sutures of two-dimensional space that is topology as set down in L'étourdit are performed to confirm how the very field of meaning is ultimately suspended from a nonsensical singular point known in Lacanian psychoanalysis as objet a. The contention is that by occupying this point the subject frees himself from the debilitating grip of meaning