One of the goals of the study of music theory is to develop sets of rules to describe different styles of music. By formalising these rules so that their semantics are machine intelligible, it is possible to use computers to reason about and analyse these rules – computational music theory. ANTONis an automatic composition system based on this approach. It formalises the rules of Renaissance Co...

Imagine a game in which you are asked to listen to a few musical selections, some of which are human compositions and some of which were created by a computer algorithm. Your job is to discriminate between the two, in what amounts to a musical Turing test. This is precisely the way in which David Cope ends the first chapter of his book Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, invitin...

Musical meta-creation is an artistic and technical field in which the results (i.e. music) often cannot be empirically tested. The processes by which music is generated, however, afford a rational level of discourse. This paper suggests ways in which we might orient our discussion and our system-building in order to explore musical possibility and use computational modeling to grow into a new k...

S April 24, 2010 Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 8:30 a.m. REGISTRATION AND COFFEE 9:00 a.m. MORNING PRESENTATIONS: Composers, Styles, and Contexts Aaron Grant Pennsylvania State University Duality in Igor Stravinsky’s Compositional Process as Seen in The Nightingale (1908-1914) Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale (1908-1914), based on a fairy tale by the Danish author H...

The keyboard is one of the most popular and enduring musical interfaces ever created. Today, the keyboard is most closely associated with the acoustic piano and the electronic keyboards inspired by it, which share the essential feature of being discrete: Notes are defined temporally by their onset and release only, with little control over each note beyond velocity and timing. Many keyboard ins...

Some studies have found that subjects give higher preference ratings and clearer emotional descriptions to pieces with the tempo/mode pairs fast/major and slow/minor. If these findings are true, one might expect to find a predominance of fast/major and slow/minor pairings in musical literature. This study looks for just such a trend in the canonical work of J.S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier. Bo...

This paper deals with a software application to visualize score analysis. Such a tool allows both the enjoyment of music in general, thanks to the synchronized execution of heterogeneous multimedia objects, and the highlighting of the results of score analyses. As a consequence, the user can investigate the compositional process and the relationships among the music objects of a given piece whi...

The use of informetric analyses has had profound effects on the development of powerful information retrieval systems. The informetric properties of melodies represented as simple collections of intervallic n-grams exhibit some remarkable similarities to the well-known informetric properties of text. Understanding these similarities can play a vital role in the creation of a successful Music In...

“Shared soundscapes” is a key concept that allows us to identify the multiplicity of agencies involved in historical sound recordings and their reactivation today. We use notion compare two very different Peruvian case studies concerning Asháninka Nomatsiguenga peoples Central Rainforest Muchik, Quechua, mestizo Lambayeque region, along with respective music traditions. Part sonic legacy stored...

I argue that library research should be conceived as a particular kind of research system, in contrast to more familiar systems like standard social scientific research (SSSR). Unlike SSSR, library research is based on nonelicited sources, recursively used and multiply ordered. It employs the associative algorithms of reading and browsing as opposed to the measurement algorithms of SSSR. Unlike...