Echoes in Plato's cave:ontology of sound objects in computer music and analysis

The sonic aspects of Plato's analogy of the cave is taken as a starting point for thought experiments to investigate the objective nature of sound, and the idea of quasi-Platonic forms in music. Sounds are found to be objects in a way that sights or appearances are not, and it is only in the presence of technology that they become artificial. When recognition, control and communication about sound come into play, abstract concepts emerge, but there is no reason to give these the priority status Plato affords to forms. Similar issues arise in discussion of the ontology of musical works, where the ideas of extension and intension prove useful for clarity about the nature of musical objects. They are also useful for strategies in the development of music software. Musical concepts are not fixed but arise from complex cultural interactions with sound. Music software should aim to use abstract concepts with are useful rather than correct

Analysing symbolic music with probabilistic grammars

Recent developments in computational linguistics offer ways to approach the analysis of musical structure by inducing probabilistic models (in the form of grammars) over a corpus of music. These can produce idiomatic sentences from a probabilistic model of the musical language and thus offer explanations of the musical structures they model. This chapter surveys historical and current work in musical analysis using grammars, based on computational linguistic approaches. We outline the theory of probabilistic grammars and illustrate their implementation in Prolog using PRISM. Our experiments on learning the probabilities for simple grammars from pitch sequences in two kinds of symbolic musical corpora are summarized. The results support our claim that probabilistic grammars are a promising framework for computational music analysis, but also indicate that further work is required to establish their superiority over Markov models

Graph based representation of the music symbolic level. A music information retrieval application

In this work, a new music symbolic level representation system is described. It has been tested in two information retrieval tasks concerning similarity between segments of music and genre detection of a given segment. It could include both harmonic and contrapuntal informations. Moreover, a new large dataset consisting of more than 5000 leadsheets is presented, with meta informations taken from different web databases, including author information, year of first performance, lyrics, genre, etc.ope

The Computational Analysis of Harmony in Western Art Music.

PhDThis thesis describes research in the computational analysis of harmony in western art music, focussing particularly on improving the accuracy and information-richness of key and chord extraction from digital score data. It is argued that a greater sophistication in automatic harmony analysis is an important contribution to the field of computational musicology. Initial experiments use hidden Markov models to predict key and modulation from automatically labelled chord sequences. Model parameters are based on heuristically formulated chord and key weightings derived from Sch¨onberg’s harmonic theory and the key and chord ratings resulting from perceptual experiments with listeners. The music theory models are shown to outperform the perceptual models both in terms of key accuracy and modelling the precise moment of key change. All of the models perform well enough to generate descriptive data about modulatory frequency, modulatory type and key distance. A robust method of classifying underlying chord types from elaborated keyboard music is then detailed. The method successfully distinguishes between essential and inessential notes, for example, passing notes and neighbour notes, and combines note classification information with tertian chord potential to measure the harmonic importance of a note. Existing approaches to automatic chord classification are unsuitable for use with complex textures and are restricted to triads and simple sevenths. An important goal is therefore to recognise a much broader set of chords, including complex chord types such as 9ths, 11ths and 13ths. This level of detail is necessary if the methods are to supply sophisticated information about the harmonic techniques of composers. Testing on the first twenty-four preludes of J. S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, hand annotated by the author, a state of the art approach achieves 22.1% accuracy; our method achieves 55% accuracy.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) DTA studentship

Software for Schenkerian Analysis

Software developed to automate the process of Schen-kerian analysis is described. The current state of the art is that moderately good analyses of small extracts can be generated, but more information is required about the criteria by which analysts make decisions among alternative interpretations in the course of analysis. The software described here allows the procedure of reduction to be examined while in process, allowing decision points, and potentially criteria, to become clear