A Memetic Analysis of a Phrase by Beethoven: Calvinian Perspectives on Similarity and Lexicon-Abstraction

This article discusses some general issues arising from the study of similarity in music, both human-conducted and computer-aided, and then progresses to a consideration of similarity relationships between patterns in a phrase by Beethoven, from the first movement of the Piano Sonata in A flat major op. 110 (1821), and various potential memetic precursors. This analysis is followed by a consideration of how the kinds of similarity identified in the Beethoven phrase might be understood in psychological/conceptual and then neurobiological terms, the latter by means of William Calvin’s Hexagonal Cloning Theory. This theory offers a mechanism for the operation of David Cope’s concept of the lexicon, conceived here as a museme allele-class. I conclude by attempting to correlate and map the various spaces within which memetic replication occurs

From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

Steven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF)

Symbolic Melodic Similarity: State of the Art and Future Challenges

Fostered by the introduction of the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX) competition, the number of systems which calculate Symbolic Melodic Similarity has recently increased considerably. In order to understand the state of the art, we provide a comparative analysis of existing algorithms. The analysis is based on eight criteria that help characterising the systems, and highlighting strengths and weaknesses. We also propose a taxonomy which classifies algorithms based on their approach. Both taxonomy and criteria are fruitfully exploited for providing input for new forthcoming research in the area

An Alternative Postulate to see Melody as “Language”

The paper proposes a way to see melodic features in music/songs in the terms of “letters” constituting “words”, while in return investigating the fulfillment of Zipf-Mandelbrot Law in them. Some interesting findings are reported including some possible conjectures for classification of melodic and musical artifacts considering several aspects of culture. The paper ends with some discussions related to further directions, be it enrichment in musicology and the possible plan for musical generative art

Exploitation of Memetics for Melodic Sequences Generation

Music, or in narrower sense, melodic contours of the aesthetically arranged pitches and the respective durations attracts our cognition since the beginning and now shaping the way we think in the complex life of culture. From evolutionary school of thoughts we could learn our perspective of seeing the musical diversity of folk songs in Indonesian archipelago by hypothesizing the aligning memes throughout the data sets. By regarding the memeplexes constructed from the the Zipf-Mandelbrot Law in melodic sequences and some mathematical characteristics of songs e.g.: gyration and spiraling effect, we construct evolutionary steps i.e.: genetic algorithm as tools for generating melodic sequences as an alternating computational methods to model the cognitive processes creating songs. While we build a melodic-contour generator, we present the enrichment on seeing the roles of limitless landscape of creativity and innovation guided by particular inspirations in the creation of work of art in general