Detecting Episodes with Harmonic Sequences for Fugue Analysis

International audienceFugues alternate between instances of the subject and of other patterns, such as the counter-subject, and modulatory sections called episodes. The episodes play an important role in the overall design of a fugue: detecting them may help the analysis of the fugue, in complement to a subject and a counter-subject detection. We propose an algorithm to retrieve episodes in the fugues of the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, starting from a symbolic score which is already track-separated. The algorithm does not use any information on subject or counter-subject occurrences, but tries to detect partial harmonic sequences, that is similar pitch contour in at least two voices. For this, it uses a substitution function considering "quantized partially overlapping intervals" [Lemström and Laine, 98] and a strict length matching for all notes, except for the first and the last one. On half of the tested fugues, the algorithm has correct or good results, enabling to sketch the design of the fugue

Music analysis and the computer: developing a computer operating system to analyse music, using Johann Sebastian Bach's "well tempered clavier" book 51 to test the methodology

"Most computerised and computer-aided musicological projects are written to achieve specific goals. Once achieved or not achieved as the case may be, the projects and their tools are frequently discarded because their dependency upon specific computer hardware and software prevents them from being utilised by other researchers for other projects. What is needed is a system that, using small tools to accomplish small tasks, can be expanded and customized to suit specific needs. This thesis proposes the creation of a music-analysis computer operating system that contains simple commands to perform simple musicological tasks such as the removal of repeated notes from a score or the audible rendition of a melodic line. The tools can be bolted together to form larger tools that perform larger tasks. New tools can be created and added to the operating system with relative ease, and these in turn can be bolted onto old tools. The thesis suggests a basic set of tools derived from old and new analytical methods, proposes a standard for their implementation based on the UNIX computer operating system, and discusses the benefits of using the system and its tools in an analysis of the twenty-four fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach from the "Well Tempered Clavier", Book II.

Language of music: a computational model of music interpretation

Automatic music transcription (AMT) is commonly defined as the process of converting an acoustic musical signal into some form of musical notation, and can be split into two separate phases: (1) multi-pitch detection, the conversion of an audio signal into a time-frequency representation similar to a MIDI file; and (2) converting from this time-frequency representation into a musical score. A substantial amount of AMT research in recent years has concentrated on multi-pitch detection, and yet, in the case of the transcription of polyphonic music, there has been little progress. There are many potential reasons for this slow progress, but this thesis concentrates on the (lack of) use of music language models during the transcription process. In particular, a music language model would impart to a transcription system the background knowledge of music theory upon which a human transcriber relies. In the related field of automatic speech recognition, it has been shown that the use of a language model drawn from the field of natural language processing (NLP) is an essential component of a system for transcribing spoken word into text, and there is no reason to believe that music should be any different. This thesis will show that a music language model inspired by NLP techniques can be used successfully for transcription. In fact, this thesis will create the blueprint for such a music language model. We begin with a brief overview of existing multi-pitch detection systems, in particular noting four key properties which any music language model should have to be useful for integration into a joint system for AMT: it should (1) be probabilistic, (2) not use any data a priori, (3) be able to run on live performance data, and (4) be incremental. We then investigate voice separation, creating a model which achieves state-of-the-art performance on the task, and show that, used as a simple music language model, it improves multi-pitch detection performance significantly. This is followed by an investigation of metrical detection and alignment, where we introduce a grammar crafted for the task which, combined with a beat-tracking model, achieves state-of-the-art results on metrical alignment. This system’s success adds more evidence to the long-existing hypothesis that music and language consist of extremely similar structures. We end by investigating the joint analysis of music, in particular showing that a combination of our two models running jointly outperforms each running independently. We also introduce a new joint, automatic, quantitative metric for the complete transcription of an audio recording into an annotated musical score, something which the field currently lacks

J.S. Bach's Well-tempered Clavier, book II : a study of its aim, historical significance and compiling process.

J. S. Bach's Well-tempered Clavier, Book II (WTC II) is one of his works whose authoritative text is yet to be established. For this kind of popular COrf1)Ositionone may find it particularly strange that no two editions give identical texts. Apart from the Interest of pubUshers, there has been no further exhaustive survey of this Issue since the work of Franz Kroll (1866) and Hans Bischoff (1884) in their respective editions. It appears that Bach's autograph In the British Ubrary, Add.35021 does not contain Bach's final authoritative text in every detail. From the evidence In some of Bach's students' copies. It has been generally assumed that Bach made a subsequent fair copy, which is now lost. My study of the manuscript copies, printed editions and other scholars' treatises in the past suggests that the lack of our understanding could be ascribed partly to the complexity In Bach's compiling and copying process, but especially to the lack of thorough and objective scholarship in manuscript study. This study focuses on Add. 35021. The aim was to reconstruct Bach's compositional activities and habits, how he drew his staves with a rastrum based on his plan of layout, how he repeatedly revised his original text, and how, when he found It Impossible to make further revisions on the same sheet, he prepared a new sheet and made out his revision on it. This process went on until he was satisfied or until he thought he would leave It for the time for future amendments. It is especially Important to distinguish Bach's initial entries from his later additions, because this is normally the only evidence of the previous state of the work. One way of doing this is to classify the types of Ink and pen used by Bach at the time. The other possible method is to note the calligraphic distinction between Bach's fair copies and his composing scores, and also the way Bach planned his layout With care from the beginning or he compressed his notations Into smaller spaces when he came towards the end. When compared with Add.35021, some of the non-autograph sources represent a unique reading of Add.35021 at a particular moment In time. By referring to such secondary sources, we can see clearly Bach's continuous revision activities on Add.35021. In other words, we can reconstruct a time-table of the order of compositions In the compilation and the multiple layers of later revisions. From the study, I have found that long before the presumed lost authoritative version would have been completed, Bach had already shown to his pupils his continually revised autograph as if it were the final revision

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

Music Synchronization, Audio Matching, Pattern Detection, and User Interfaces for a Digital Music Library System

Over the last two decades, growing efforts to digitize our cultural heritage could be observed. Most of these digitization initiatives pursuit either one or both of the following goals: to conserve the documents - especially those threatened by decay - and to provide remote access on a grand scale. For music documents these trends are observable as well, and by now several digital music libraries are in existence. An important characteristic of these music libraries is an inherent multimodality resulting from the large variety of available digital music representations, such as scanned score, symbolic score, audio recordings, and videos. In addition, for each piece of music there exists not only one document of each type, but many. Considering and exploiting this multimodality and multiplicity, the DFG-funded digital library initiative PROBADO MUSIC aimed at developing a novel user-friendly interface for content-based retrieval, document access, navigation, and browsing in large music collections. The implementation of such a front end requires the multimodal linking and indexing of the music documents during preprocessing. As the considered music collections can be very large, the automated or at least semi-automated calculation of these structures would be recommendable. The field of music information retrieval (MIR) is particularly concerned with the development of suitable procedures, and it was the goal of PROBADO MUSIC to include existing and newly developed MIR techniques to realize the envisioned digital music library system. In this context, the present thesis discusses the following three MIR tasks: music synchronization, audio matching, and pattern detection. We are going to identify particular issues in these fields and provide algorithmic solutions as well as prototypical implementations. In Music synchronization, for each position in one representation of a piece of music the corresponding position in another representation is calculated. This thesis focuses on the task of aligning scanned score pages of orchestral music with audio recordings. Here, a previously unconsidered piece of information is the textual specification of transposing instruments provided in the score. Our evaluations show that the neglect of such information can result in a measurable loss of synchronization accuracy. Therefore, we propose an OCR-based approach for detecting and interpreting the transposition information in orchestral scores. For a given audio snippet, audio matching methods automatically calculate all musically similar excerpts within a collection of audio recordings. In this context, subsequence dynamic time warping (SSDTW) is a well-established approach as it allows for local and global tempo variations between the query and the retrieved matches. Moving to real-life digital music libraries with larger audio collections, however, the quadratic runtime of SSDTW results in untenable response times. To improve on the response time, this thesis introduces a novel index-based approach to SSDTW-based audio matching. We combine the idea of inverted file lists introduced by Kurth and Müller (Efficient index-based audio matching, 2008) with the shingling techniques often used in the audio identification scenario. In pattern detection, all repeating patterns within one piece of music are determined. Usually, pattern detection operates on symbolic score documents and is often used in the context of computer-aided motivic analysis. Envisioned as a new feature of the PROBADO MUSIC system, this thesis proposes a string-based approach to pattern detection and a novel interactive front end for result visualization and analysis

Volume 24, Number 11 (November 1906)

Richard Strauss: A Short Story of the Composer Whom James Huneker Calls An Anarch in Art Hungarian Music and the Gipsies Education of the Masters Music and Mental Science Babylonian Origin of Music as an Art and Science Touch in Pianoforte Playing Musical Education: What It Means What is Good Taste in Music?https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/etude/1519/thumbnail.jp

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021, 19–22 July, 2021 University of Alicante (Spain): Onsite & Online

Este documento incluye los artículos y pósters presentados en el Music Encoding Conference 2021 realizado en Alicante entre el 19 y el 22 de julio de 2022.Funded by project Multiscore, MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103