Comment on Huron and Veltman: Does a Cognitive Approach to Medieval Mode Make Sense?

This commentary examines Huron and Veltman’s article from the perspective of historical musicology. The following issues are discussed: • The authors regard modes as conceptual categories of the medieval listener, which seems unlikely on historical and theoretical grounds. • Pitch class profiles are not a good way of capturing the melodic nature of the modes. • The diatonic rather than the chromatic scale should be employed as the reference pitch system for the modes. • The tentative explanation of the transition from modality to tonality ignores the fundamental differences between modes and keys, and the role of polyphony in this supposed transition. The article’s methodology, to apply quantitative methods to problems of historical musicology, is fundamentally sound, and suggestions are made in this commentary as to how its shortcomings can be amended by reformulating research questions and redesigning methods

Towards Automated Processing of Folk Song Recordings

Folk music is closely related to the musical culture of a specific nation or region. Even though folk songs have been passed down mainly by oral tradition, most musicologists study the relation between folk songs on the basis of symbolic music descriptions, which are obtained by transcribing recorded tunes into a score-like representation. Due to the complexity of audio recordings, once having the transcriptions, the original recorded tunes are often no longer used in the actual folk song research even though they still may contain valuable information. In this paper, we present various techniques for making audio recordings more easily accessible for music researchers. In particular, we show how one can use synchronization techniques to automatically segment and annotate the recorded songs. The processed audio recordings can then be made accessible along with a symbolic transcript by means of suitable visualization, searching, and navigation interfaces to assist folk song researchers to conduct large scale investigations comprising the audio material

Hooked on Music Information Retrieval

This article provides a reply to 'Lure(d) into listening: The potential of cognition-based music information retrieval,' in which Henkjan Honing discusses the potential impact of his proposed Listen, Lure & Locate project on Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Honing presents some critical remarks on data-oriented approaches in MIR, which we endorse. To place these remarks in context, we first give a brief overview of the state of the art of MIR research. Then we present a series of arguments that show why purely data-oriented approaches are unlikely to take MIR research and applications to a more advanced level. Next, we propose our view on MIR research, in which the modelling of musical knowledge has a central role. Finally, we elaborate on the ideas in Honing's paper from a MIR perspective in this paper and propose some additions to the Listen, Lure & Locate project

Чудо на Волині

Твір «Кирик» був записаний відомим житомирським збирачем фольклору Василем Кравченком від Мирона Андрусяка із села Стрибіж Пулинської волості Житомирського повіту у 1908 році. Віднайдений твір був опублікований у збірнику «Труды общества исследователей Волыни. Этнографическиє материалы» в Житомирі 1911 року у п’ятому томі (розділ «Проза» , підрозділ VII «Про скарби»). В опублікованому варіанті В. Кравченка спостерігається зміщення частин тексту, що пояснюється ймовірною помилкою при наборі тексту в друкарні. Тому подається реконструйований варіант твору зі збереженням його мовних діалектних особливостей

09051 Abstracts Collection -- Knowledge representation for intelligent music processing

From the twenty-fifth to the thirtieth of January, 2009, the Dagstuhl Seminar 09051 on ``Knowledge representation for intelligent music processing\u27\u27 was held in Schloss Dagstuhl~--~Leibniz Centre for Informatics. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations and demos given during the seminar as well as plenary presentations, reports of workshop discussions, results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general, followed by plenary `stimulus\u27 papers, followed by reports and abstracts arranged by workshop followed finally by some concluding materials providing views of both the seminar itself and also forward to the longer-term goals of the discipline. Links to extended abstracts, full papers and supporting materials are provided, if available. The organisers thank David Lewis for editing these proceedings

Flabase: towards the creation of a flamenco music knowledge base

Online information about flamenco music is scattered overdifferent sites and knowledge bases. Unfortunately, thereis no common repository that indexes all these data. Inthis work, information related to flamenco music is gath-ered from general knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia, DB-pedia), music encyclopedias (e.g., MusicBrainz), and spe-cialized flamenco websites, and is then integrated into anew knowledge base called FlaBase. As resources fromdifferent data sources do not share common identifiers, aprocess of pair-wise entity resolution has been performed.FlaBase contains information about 1,174 artists, 76pa-los(flamenco genres), 2,913 albums, 14,078 tracks, and771 Andalusian locations. It is freely available in RDF andJSON formats. In addition, a method for entity recognitionand disambiguation for FlaBase has been created. The sys-tem can recognize and disambiguate FlaBase entity refer-ences in Spanish texts with an f-measure value of 0.77. Weapplied it to biographical texts present in Flabase. By usingthe extracted information, the knowledge base is populatedwith relevant information and a semantic graph is createdconnecting the entities of FlaBase. Artists relevance is thencomputed over the graph and evaluated according to a fla-menco expert criteria. Accuracy of results shows a highdegree of quality and completeness of the knowledge base

Saccadic selection and crowding in visual search:stronger lateral masking leads to shorter search times

We investigated the role of crowding in saccadic selection during visual search. To guide eye movements, often information from the visual periphery is used. Crowding is known to deteriorate the quality of peripheral information. In four search experiments, we studied the role of crowding, by accompanying individual search elements by flankers. Varying the difference between target and flankers allowed us to manipulate crowding strength throughout the stimulus. We found that eye movements are biased toward areas with little crowding for conditions where a target could be discriminated peripherally. Interestingly, for conditions in which the target could not be discriminated peripherally, this bias reversed to areas with strong crowding. This led to shorter search times for a target presented in areas with stronger crowding, compared to a target presented in areas with less crowding. These findings suggest a dual role for crowding in visual search. The presence of flankers similar to the target deteriorates the quality of the peripheral target signal but can also attract eye movements, as more potential targets are present over the area

Метод формирования помехоустойчивого кода энергонезависимой памяти приборов семейства jButton типа DS1971 систем санкционированного проезда в лифтах

Рассмотрена задача ограничения доступа в лифты посторонних лиц и пользователей, имеющих существенную задолженность по коммунальным платежам. Предложено использование систем санкционированного проезда, использующих электронные ключи семейства jButton типа DS1971 с энергонезависимой памятью EEPROM. Разработан метод формирования помехоустойчивого кода для энергонезависимой памяти, повышающей безотказность работы лифтовой системы санкционированного проезда.Розглянуто задачу обмеження доступу у ліфти сторонніх осіб та користувачів, що мають суттєву заборгованість по комунальних платежах. Запропоновано використання систем санкціонованого проїзду, які використовують електронні ключі сімейства jButton типу DS1971 з енергонезалежною пам’яттю EEPROM. Розроблено метод формування завадостійкого коду для енергонезалежної пам’яті, що підвищує безвідмовність роботи ліфтової системи санкціонованого проїзду.The problem of restriction of access to lifts of extraneous persons and the users having essential debts on municipal payments is considered. Use of systems of the authorized journey using electronic keys of family jButton of type DS1971 with power independent memory EEPROM is offered. The method of formation of a noiseproof code is developed for the power independent memory, raising non-failure operation of work of lift system of the authorized journey