Compression-based Dependencies Among Rhythmic Motifs in a Score

Music similarity has been widely studied through melodic and harmonic matching, clustering, and using various metrics for measuring distance. Such analyses offer the musicologist a view of the ‘sameness’ of parts of a score. However, similarity alone does not necessarily allow exploitation of that sameness in reasoning about the music. In this paper, we present work in progress to investigate rhythm similarity at various scales, beginning at the smallest (single measures or groups of measures). We use normalised compression distance and variations thereof to derive similarity-based dependencies between parts of the music. Establishing such dependencies may allow software engineering dependence analysis techniques to be applied to music to, e.g. remove from focus aspects not relevant to a particular enquiry (‘slicing’), determine the sensitivity of later parts of the music on former parts (‘impact analysis’), and to find motivic processes and developments within the musical form. The analysis will thus draw on software engineering techniques, information theory, and data compression. Our results thus far show that text-based compressors introduce significant non-linear artefacts at small scales making similarity identification based on compressed lengths difficult. Future work will involve progressively larger scale music to determine the sensitivity of the results to the size of music being analysed in order to guide musicologists wanting to adopt similar approaches. We expect to find that at larger scales, the artefacts in text compression become less significant and identifying the threshold at which this happens is thus important. We discuss tree compression as having the potential to capture musically-important relationships lost by text compression and believe that this approach would be more successful at small scales

Comparative Study of Alternating Low-band-Gap Benzothiadiazole Co-oligomers

The benzothiadiazole – arylene alternating conjugated oligomers have been designed and synthesized via Suzuki coupling reaction. The structures and properties of the conjugated oligomers were characterized by 1HNMR, 13CNMR, UV–vis absorption spectroscopy, photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The luminescent measurements demonstrate that polybenzothiadiazoles are good chromophores able to form thin films by Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique, making them suitable for further applications. Also the electrical properties of obtained films confirm the good potential of these novel aryl-based π-conjugated polymers for the development of various electrical and electrochemical solid-state devices

Opto-Electronic Properties of Fluorene-Based Derivatives as Precursors for Light-Emitting Diodes

This paper reports optical absorption spectra of oxidized fluorene copolymers obtained by chemical oxidation with Ce(IV) and by pulse radiolysis experiments in chlorinated solvents. Comparison of the results observed by the two techniques is used to provide spectral data on the copolymer radical ions and information on stability of the oxidized species. In addition, a detailed quantum chemical characterization is presented, concerning the electronic and optical properties of three series of charged oligomers containing alternating fluorene and phenylene or thienylene or benzothiadiazole units, respectively. The introduction of the comonomer strongly influences the optical properties, leading to a red shift in the absorption spectra of the charged oligomers. This shift is more pronounced in the case of fluorene benzothiadiazole anions due to the strong electron-accepting character of the benzothiadiazole moieties. The charge distribution of the fluorene benzothiadiazole anion is different from that corresponding to fluorene phenylene and fluorene thienylene anions. The negative charge of the latter oligomers is evenly distributed over the fluorene units, while the former oligomer localizes the negative charge on the benzothiadiazole units. The charge distribution correlates with the optical absorption spectra. When the positive charge is localized on a different unit than the negative charge, the cation and anion spectra are different. Similar spectra are obtained if both the positive and negative charges are localized on the same unit