7,914 research outputs found

    Synaesthesia and the creative process: a study of its inspiration in Scriabin’s "Prometheus"

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    The role of synaesthesia in composition is difficult to assess, but for those who possess it synaesthesia is an inherent source of inspiration. It is not a compositional tool as such, yet synaesthesia is fundamental to the creative and compositional processes of certain artists. The term synaesthesia describes various multi-sensory experiences of artistic expression. Though many are riveted by synaesthesia, there is a lot of literature dismissing it as a gimmick used by artists and composers to increase their popularity among audiences. Synaesthesia, however, has been integral to the compositional processes of composers such as Olivier Messiean, Michael Torke and specifically Alexandre Scriabin. The pieces written by Scriabin were expressions of what he saw, tasted and felt when hearing music. There would not be a Prometheus: The Poem of Fire if Scriabin had not harnessed his synaesthesia to inform his compositional process. This paper will cover several topics in relation to synaesthesia. Firstly synaesthesia will be defined and its historical background will briefly be discussed. Information on academic interest and inventors will follow, shedding light on the research that has already been conducted in this field. This paper will then explore the impact that synaesthesia has on the artistic community and on the lives of particular composers; namely Michael Torke and Alexandre Scriabin. The second section will specifically cover Scriabin’s composition Prometheus. It will be analysed from a synaesthetic point of view, both from the author’s perspective and that of Scriabin, which will take the paper to its conclusion. This paper contributes to a developing academic sector that deals with synaesthesia and how it has been treated over time; with a view to explains its role and impact on musical composition

    PerformanceNet: Score-to-Audio Music Generation with Multi-Band Convolutional Residual Network

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    Music creation is typically composed of two parts: composing the musical score, and then performing the score with instruments to make sounds. While recent work has made much progress in automatic music generation in the symbolic domain, few attempts have been made to build an AI model that can render realistic music audio from musical scores. Directly synthesizing audio with sound sample libraries often leads to mechanical and deadpan results, since musical scores do not contain performance-level information, such as subtle changes in timing and dynamics. Moreover, while the task may sound like a text-to-speech synthesis problem, there are fundamental differences since music audio has rich polyphonic sounds. To build such an AI performer, we propose in this paper a deep convolutional model that learns in an end-to-end manner the score-to-audio mapping between a symbolic representation of music called the piano rolls and an audio representation of music called the spectrograms. The model consists of two subnets: the ContourNet, which uses a U-Net structure to learn the correspondence between piano rolls and spectrograms and to give an initial result; and the TextureNet, which further uses a multi-band residual network to refine the result by adding the spectral texture of overtones and timbre. We train the model to generate music clips of the violin, cello, and flute, with a dataset of moderate size. We also present the result of a user study that shows our model achieves higher mean opinion score (MOS) in naturalness and emotional expressivity than a WaveNet-based model and two commercial sound libraries. We open our source code at https://github.com/bwang514/PerformanceNetComment: 8 pages, 6 figures, AAAI 2019 camera-ready versio

    Multiple Media Interfaces for Music Therapy

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    This article describes interfaces (and the supporting technological infrastructure) to create audiovisual instruments for use in music therapy. In considering how the multidimensional nature of sound requires multidimensional input control, we propose a model to help designers manage the complex mapping between input devices and multiple media software. We also itemize a research agenda

    Embodied listening and the music of Sigur Ros

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    In 1990 Susan McClary and Robert Walser appealed for a musicology which could account for the effects of rock, or as they put it: ‘a greater willingness to try to circumscribe an effect metaphorically, to bring one’s own experience as a human being to bear in unpacking musical gestures, to try to parallel in words something of how the music feels’ (McClary and Walser 1990, 288-9). McClary and Walser were arguing for attempts to validate ‘physically and emotionally oriented responses to music’ (287), which they saw as crucial to any understanding of rock, but uncomfortable modes of response for musicology to deal with. Around the time of the McClary/Walser article, musicologists were questioning the body’s exclusion from discourse, and theorising ways in which it might be better integrated into musicological thought (Leppert 1993, Walser 1991). Since that time much scholarly work has been produced which interrogates the role of the body in musicking, work represented for instance by an examination of the idea of gesture (Gritten and King 2006, Davidson 1993). The bodies under examination in this discourse have been those of performers, but increasing attention is being focused on how performers experience the production of music. Fred Everett Maus has recently termed this approach an ‘analytical somaesthetics’, following Richard Shusterman (Maus 2010). This article uses facets of embodiment theory to interrogate the music of Icelandic band Sigur Rós, a group who seem to affect audience and critics alike in a way that is highly unusual for rock music. One of the questions their music poses echoes one that McClary and Walser asked in 1990, namely how we might account for the expressive effect of rock music. I will begin by theorising embodied listening, and accounting for how it might apply to rock music, before presenting readings of two Sigur Rós songs premised on interrogating how the listener is afforded opportunities for embodied participation

    Sound mosaics: a graphical user interface for sound synthesis based on audio-visual associations.

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    This thesis presents the design of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for computer-based sound synthesis to support users in the externalisation of their musical ideas when interacting with the System in order to create and manipulate sound. The approach taken consisted of three research stages. The first stage was the formulation of a novel visualisation framework to display perceptual dimensions of sound in Visual terms. This framework was based on the findings of existing related studies and a series of empirical investigations of the associations between auditory and visual precepts that we performed for the first time in the area of computer-based sound synthesis. The results of our empirical investigations suggested associations between the colour dimensions of brightness and saturation with the auditory dimensions of pitch and loudness respectively, as well as associations between the multidimensional precepts of visual texture and timbre. The second stage of the research involved the design and implementation of Sound Mosaics, a prototype GUI for sound synthesis based on direct manipulation of visual representations that make use of the visualisation framework developed in the first stage. We followed an iterative design approach that involved the design and evaluation of an initial Sound Mosaics prototype. The insights gained during this first iteration assisted us in revising various aspects of the original design and visualisation framework that led to a revised implementation of Sound Mosaics. The final stage of this research involved an evaluation study of the revised Sound Mosaics prototype that comprised two controlled experiments. First, a comparison experiment with the widely used frequency-domain representations of sound indicated that visual representations created with Sound Mosaics were more comprehensible and intuitive. Comprehensibility was measured as the level of accuracy in a series of sound image association tasks, while intuitiveness was related to subjects' response times and perceived levels of confidence. Second, we conducted a formative evaluation of Sound Mosaics, in which it was exposed to a number of users with and without musical background. Three usability factors were measured: effectiveness, efficiency, and subjective satisfaction. Sound Mosaics was demonstrated to perform satisfactorily in ail three factors for music subjects, although non-music subjects yielded less satisfactory results that can be primarily attributed to the subjects' unfamiliarity with the task of sound synthesis. Overall, our research has set the necessary groundwork for empirically derived and validated associations between auditory and visual dimensions that can be used in the design of cognitively useful GUIs for computer-based sound synthesis and related area

    All Buttons In: An investigation into the use of the 1176 FET compressor in popular music production

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    The Urei/Universal Audio 1176 is one of the most revered and popular compressors used in music production (Senior 2009). Bill Putnam introduced the design in 1966 and at the time it was the first peak limiter based on all transistor circuit (Universal Audio 2009). Many engineers attribute its famous sound to the FET and fast time constants and despite being through many revisions it is still a studio staple today. This paper aims to investigate why the 1176 is so widely used in production and will attempt to define its particular sonic signature. Due to the nature of popular music production and its under researched status in academia, information will primarily be gathered from textbooks and interviews given by contemporary music producers. From this information the author will attempt to ascertain how producers use the 1176 and undertake a series of subjective listening tests to verify their views

    Classification of Musical Instruments sounds by Using MFCC and Timbral Audio Descriptors

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    Identification of the musical instrument from a music piece is becoming area of interest for researchers in recent years. The system for identification of musical instrument from monophonic audio recording is basically performs three tasks: i) Pre-processing of inputted music signal; ii) Feature extraction from the music signal; iii) Classification. There are many methods to extract the audio features from an audio recording like Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC), Linear Predictive Codes (LPC), Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC), Perceptual Linear Predictive Coefficients (PLP), etc. The paper presents an idea to identify musical instruments from monophonic audio recordings by extracting MFCC features and timbre related audio descriptors. Further, three classifiers K-Nearest Neighbors (K-NN), Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Binary Tree Classifier (BT) are used to identify the musical instrument name by using feature vector generated in feature extraction process. The analysis is made by studying results obtained by all possible combinations of feature extraction methods and classifiers. Percentage accuracies for each combination are calculated to find out which combinations can give better musical instrument identification results. The system gives higher percentage accuracies of 90.00%, 77.00% and 75.33% for five, ten and fifteen musical instruments respectively if MFCC is used with K-NN classifier and for Timbral ADs higher percentage accuracies of 88.00%, 84.00% and 73.33% are obtained for five, ten and fifteen musical instruments respectively if BT classifier is used. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.150713

    Contrasting noises and expanding sounds: the composition process of Caminantes I to IV

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    This article explores some of the compositional techniques of a cycle of four pieces called Caminantes. Firstly, it comments on the importance of timbre and texture, the starting point for my own creation of material and its articulation. In this part, the contributions of different composers of the 20th Century are discussed, in order to contextualise the ideas and techniques used in the composition of the Caminantes cycle. Then there is an analysis of the compositions from the point of view of form, extended techniques, harmony, microtonality and indeterminacy. The analysis is aided by digital audio analysis, i.e. spectrograms as well as by sections of the score

    Immersive Composition for Sensory Rehabilitation: 3D Visualisation, Surround Sound, and Synthesised Music to Provoke Catharsis and Healing

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    There is a wide range of sensory therapies using sound, music and visual stimuli. Some focus on soothing or distracting stimuli such as natural sounds or classical music as analgesic, while other approaches emphasize the active performance of producing music as therapy. This paper proposes an immersive multi-sensory Exposure Therapy for people suffering from anxiety disorders, based on a rich, detailed surround-soundscape. This soundscape is composed to include the users’ own idiosyncratic anxiety triggers as a form of habituation, and to provoke psychological catharsis, as a non-verbal, visceral and enveloping exposure. To accurately pinpoint the most effective sounds and to optimally compose the soundscape we will monitor the participants’ physiological responses such as electroencephalography, respiration, electromyography, and heart rate during exposure. We hypothesize that such physiologically optimized sensory landscapes will aid the development of future immersive therapies for various psychological conditions, Sound is a major trigger of anxiety, and auditory hypersensitivity is an extremely problematic symptom. Exposure to stress-inducing sounds can free anxiety sufferers from entrenched avoidance behaviors, teaching physiological coping strategies and encouraging resolution of the psychological issues agitated by the sound
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