Linking Sheet Music and Audio - Challenges and New Approaches

Score and audio files are the two most important ways to represent, convey, record, store, and experience music. While score describes a piece of music on an abstract level using symbols such as notes, keys, and measures, audio files allow for reproducing a specific acoustic realization of the piece. Each of these representations reflects different facets of music yielding insights into aspects ranging from structural elements (e.g., motives, themes, musical form) to specific performance aspects (e.g., artistic shaping, sound). Therefore, the simultaneous access to score and audio representations is of great importance. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically generating musically relevant linking structures between the various data sources that are available for a given piece of music. In particular, we discuss the task of sheet music-audio synchronization with the aim to link regions in images of scanned scores to musically corresponding sections in an audio recording of the same piece. Such linking structures form the basis for novel interfaces that allow users to access and explore multimodal sources of music within a single framework. As our main contributions, we give an overview of the state-of-the-art for this kind of synchronization task, we present some novel approaches, and indicate future research directions. In particular, we address problems that arise in the presence of structural differences and discuss challenges when applying optical music recognition to complex orchestral scores. Finally, potential applications of the synchronization results are presented

A Study of Form and Structure in Pierre Boulez\u27s Pli selon Pli

In his 1963 treatise, Penser la musique aujourd’hui, Pierre Boulez proposes that there should be no distinction between serial materials and large-scale form. After his self-professed failure with Structures 1a and Polyphonie X due to the incapacity of the twelve-tone series to provide form in and of itself, Boulez reassessed and expanded his compositional approach to include what he refers to as “indiscipline,” which permitted him a new freedom to modify his materials as he saw fit through a plethora of new techniques, and to link these materials to large-scale forms that take their inspiration largely from literary influences. This investigation seeks to concretize Boulez’s proposed relationship between serial content and large-scale form in “Don” (1962) and “Tombeau” (1959), the framing movements of Pli selon Pli, largely by establishing the nature of their formal organization and the origin of the serial materials used in their construction. The course of this investigation traces the developmental history of materials used in “Don” and “Tombeau” which includes analyses of materials used in the unpublished Oubli signal lapidé (1952), the retracted drama L’Orestie (1954–55), the unpublished work for solo flute Strophes (1955–56), the Troisième Sonate (1955–57), Le Marteau sans maître (1953-55) and the inner movements of Pli selon Pli: the “Improvisation[s] sur Mallarmé I, II, and III” (1957, 1957, and 1959 respectively). The materials developed for “Don” and “Tombeau” are largely continuations of different lineages of serial materials developed for these earlier works and form constellations of structurally related materials that persist beyond the boundaries of individual works. Taken together, the works composed during the period 1952–62 are the most inspired and creative in Boulez’s compositional history. The trajectory of this investigation incrementally introduces the reader to increasingly larger-scale means of organizing serial materials that culminate in Boulez’s evolving theory of discontinuous musical form. Connections among works and their organizational structure are largely derived from sketch studies undertaken at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland

Content-based music retrieval by acoustic query

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

The Roles of Invariance and Analogy in the Linear Design of Stravinsky’s “Musick to heare”

A list of contributing author biographie