Electronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions (ELVIS): The first large data-driven research project on musical style

The ELVIS project had three locally based teams (in Canada, at McGill, in Scotland, at Aberdeen, and in New England, USA, divided between MIT, the lead, and Yale), each of which focused on a different aspect of the overall research program: using computers to understand musical style. The central unifying concept of the ELVIS project was to study counterpoint: the way combinations of voices in polyphonic music (e.g. the soprano and bass voices in a hymn, or the viola and cello in a string quartet, as well as combinations of more than two voices) interact: i.e. what are the permissible vertical intervals (notes from two voices sounding at the same time) for a particular period, genre, or style. These vertical intervals, connected by melodic motions in individual voices, constitute Vertical Interval Successions. In more modern terms, this could be described as harmonic progressions of chords, but what made ELVIS particularly flexible was its ability to bridge the gap to earlier, contrapuntally-conceived music by using the diad (a two-note combination) rather than the triad (a combination of three notes in particular arrangements) as a basis (since triads and beyond may be expressed as sums of diads)

Accidentals in the mid-fifteenth century : a computer-aided study of the Buxheim organ book and its concordances

The Buxheim Organ Book, the largest fifteenth-century manuscript of keyboard tablature, has never before been examined as a whole in light of musica ficta issues, although it contains far more accidentals than any contemporaneous source in mensural notation. Although tablature has been used by various scholars to examine accidentals in sixteenth-century music, studies of fifteenth-century accidentals have focussed on theoretical evidence and small groups of pieces from mensural sources. The author uses the Buxheim Organ Book to extend the investigations of accidentals in tablature back into the fifteenth century, combining the large data set provided by this manuscript with a statistical approach modelled on that of Thomas Brothers's smaller-scale study of the chansons of Binchois. Specialised computer programs are introduced, which detect musical structures relevant to the analysis of Renaissance music such as different types of cadential voice leading. These programs function as extensions to David Huron's Humdrum Toolkit. With these tools, signing practises in the intabulations are statistically compared with all of the concordances of the models. Conclusions are suggested pertaining to issues of signature accidental transmission, partial signatures, mode, and musica ficta, which can be used as a contextual backdrop for the analysis of individual pieces. The evidence provided by the accidentals in Buxheim and its concordances draws a clear picture of how a group of fifteenth-century musicians added accidentals to polyphonic music. For the first time, this study provides us with principles and guidelines for musica ficta -decisions based on actual practice

A comparison of automated methods for the analysis of style in fifteenth-century song intabulations

   Background in historical musicology. A repertory of several thousand secular songs survives from the fifteenth century. Much of it is not attributed to any particular author, and frequently, even the approximate place of origin is uncertain. For us, the origin of a piece is a concern, so that we can better chart the development of musical style. Researchers have tried many approaches to attribution, or to style-classification in a broader sense: manuscript studies of all descriptions, studies of structural elements such as cadence degrees, ornamental style, elements of melodic behaviour such as contour, favoured intervals, and prevalence of leaps; dissonance treatment, and others. However, a comprehensive analysis of all these elements in a sufficiently large body of pieces is too time-consuming for one person to do by hand. Background in music information retrieval. Information technology has made it possible to analyze large amounts of data in a reduced timespan, as compared to traditional methods. While this capability has been available for some time, the analysis of multiple musical works by computer is still relatively unexplored in music theory. Modern classification techniques require the extraction of features from sets of data, which are then resolved using higher level constructions. Aims. To detail an approach and toolset for feature-set-based analysis of musical works of the fifteenth century as applied to the Buxheim Organ Book, to show some initial results, and to suggest further avenues for musicological exploration of the Buxheim Organ Book and related repertoire. Main contribution. Several hundred intabulations of secular songs from the Buxheim Organ Book (ca. 1450-1470) have been analysed to produce individual sets of approximately fifty features using the Humdrum toolkit, as well as specially-constructed software tools. Some of these were general statistical features and others were features commonly examined in style studies of the mid-fifteenth-century secular song repertoire. This paper focuses on details of the initial tools developed for this project, some overall properties of the entire Buxheim set, and their relationship to previous music-theoretical work on the subject. Implications. While some researchers have developed useful automated tools for musical analysis, these have rarely been combined with detailed musicological study of earlier repertories. Applying multiple automated tests to a single body of music gives musicologists an opportunity to compare the effectiveness and usefulness of such tools for specific tasks. Solutions specific to the analysis of the chosen repertory have been proposed, and the large-scale results will allow us re-evaluate existing musicological ideas about these pieces.

ELVIS - Final Report

The ELVIS project had three locally based teams (in Canada, at McGill, in Scotland, at Aberdeen, and in New England, USA, divided between MIT, the lead, and Yale), each of which focused on a different aspect of the overall research program: using computers to understand musical style. The central unifying concept of the ELVIS project was to study counterpoint: the way combinations of voices in polyphonic music (e.g. the soprano and bass voices in a hymn, or the viola and cello in a string quartet, as well as combinations of more than two voices) interact: i.e. what are the permissible vertical intervals (notes from two voices sounding at the same time) for a particular period, genre, or style