The Computational Analysis of Harmony in Western Art Music.

PhDThis thesis describes research in the computational analysis of harmony in western art music, focussing particularly on improving the accuracy and information-richness of key and chord extraction from digital score data. It is argued that a greater sophistication in automatic harmony analysis is an important contribution to the field of computational musicology. Initial experiments use hidden Markov models to predict key and modulation from automatically labelled chord sequences. Model parameters are based on heuristically formulated chord and key weightings derived from Sch¨onberg’s harmonic theory and the key and chord ratings resulting from perceptual experiments with listeners. The music theory models are shown to outperform the perceptual models both in terms of key accuracy and modelling the precise moment of key change. All of the models perform well enough to generate descriptive data about modulatory frequency, modulatory type and key distance. A robust method of classifying underlying chord types from elaborated keyboard music is then detailed. The method successfully distinguishes between essential and inessential notes, for example, passing notes and neighbour notes, and combines note classification information with tertian chord potential to measure the harmonic importance of a note. Existing approaches to automatic chord classification are unsuitable for use with complex textures and are restricted to triads and simple sevenths. An important goal is therefore to recognise a much broader set of chords, including complex chord types such as 9ths, 11ths and 13ths. This level of detail is necessary if the methods are to supply sophisticated information about the harmonic techniques of composers. Testing on the first twenty-four preludes of J. S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, hand annotated by the author, a state of the art approach achieves 22.1% accuracy; our method achieves 55% accuracy.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) DTA studentship

Creativity the WHOLE or the HOLE in Business Education

This paper explores the view that a ‘hole’ exists in Business Education where creativity should be. The ‘creative graduate’ is essential in an increasingly competitive market. (IBM 2010) However, creativity is not seen as being part of the mainstream university curriculum as executives fail to see its importance (Jackson, 2014). Creativity should be characterised by openness and freedom, but until policy makers like QAA explicitly include creativity into subject benchmarks, little will change (Jackson and Shaw, 2006, 2015). The ‘machinery of targets, measurement and control’ minimises creativity (Simmons and Thompson, 2008) and creative pedagogy is all but killed by standardization and stringent performance targets (Banaji and Burn, 2007). This research focused on 3 groups of students from a NE England university through and beyond a creativity intervention. There were two phases of data gathering. In the first phase, before the intervention, their opinions about creativity and its value/role in business were collected. Throughout the programme, feedback was gathered around specific sessions and an evaluation of the research themes was collated. Phase 2 took place 6-12 months later and consisted of semi-structured interviews. Participants related their experiences about whether the intervention was being translated into actions and behaviours at work. Despite being a small-scale single university study, it provides rich detail of the experience of a creativity intervention. A novel feature is the consideration of the longitudinal impact. The results provide support for the growing literature which calls for creativity to become a mainstream element in the curriculum (Foresights 2015). Key words – Creativity, Higher Education, Business Curriculum, Personal Creativity, Organisational Creativit

Environmental changes within British workplaces 1979-1997 : Their impact on management.

Despite the wealth of research which has been gathered, studied and documented with regard to a range of workplace industrial relations issues it is believed that a comprehensive analysis of the employment relationship has not been conducted for the period 1979 to 1997. Therefore, the thesis aims to add to the body of knowledge by providing an analysis of the changes which occurred within organisations and how these brought about a transformation of the employment relationship in the U.K. It explores two seemingly contrasting viewpoints which debate the extent to which change has occurred in the workplace between 1979 and 1997. The study has asserted that these two theories cannot be directly compared with each other as they are drawn from very different sets of data i.e. the argument which states that radical change occurred in the management of labour was founded on data gathered nationally whereas the opposing stance was based on information drawn from individual workplaces.The study is, on the whole founded on data gathered from five large multi-site organisations. This is justified as large organisations still employ a majority of the workforce and thus offer an opportunity to examine the impact of the various changes to workplace management at both individual site level as well as national level enabling a comparison to be made of the two opposing viewpoints outlined above.A pragmatic-critical realist approach which used a case study methodology was adopted throughout the thesis. This enabled the data to be inductively accessed from various sources. It is argued that the methods used complemented each other thus providing a solid framework within which to undertake the study. It should be noted that the research tended to be drawn from qualitative methods which concentrated on interaction between external and internal variables in order to enable an analysis of the data.The thesis concludes that although change occurred in the working relationship it was not driven by any single factor between 1979 and 1997. It is influenced by a number of factors such as the level of competition, the nature of the business, the geographical location of each site, leadership style, industrial relations legislation and theemployment relationship. It further highlights that unless insecurities and fears of the workforce are addressed by British corporate management employees will be drawn back towards traditional patterns of behaviour thus 'forcing' management to reexamine their styles and practices yet again