Even amidst the hustle and bustle of busy lives, numerous people dream of playing a musical instrument. Unfortunately, many may never get a chance to touch one. But this doesn’t stop them from ‘air drumming’ or playing ‘air guitar’ passionately while listening to their favorite tunes. To encourage this passion for music, especially in the absence of a real instrument, we introduce to you the Vi...

With the fast booming of online music repositories, there is a need for content-based automatic indexing which will help users to find their favorite music objects in real time. Recently, numerous successful approaches on musical data feature extraction and selection have been proposed for instrument recognition in monophonic sounds. Unfortunately, none of these methods can be successfully appl...

GENERATION by SHU ZHANG (Under the Direction of Khaled Rasheed) ABSTRACT In this thesis, two music accompaniment systems are presented. Evac (the evolutionary accompanist) is a system that engages in musical improvisation with the user. It uses a novel, implicitly interactive, genetic algorithm (GA), which allows the user’s actions to influence Evac’s musical performance without the need for ex...

Increasing growth and popularity of multimedia resources available on the Web brought the need to provide new, more advanced tools needed for research. However, searching through multimedia data is highly non-trivial task that requires content-based indexing of the data. My research will focus on automatic extraction of information about the sound timbre, and indexing sound data with informatio...

sociomusicology (sociology of music) as a branch of art sociology aims at identifying the relationships between music and social structures. the main question faced by the sociologists of music is how the conditions of a given social system affect the dominant music style of a culture or the subculture of a group and how the public tendencies for a specific music style affect a social system an...

Musical skills and expertise vary greatly in Western societies. Individuals can differ in their repertoire of musical behaviours as well as in the level of skill they display for any single musical behaviour. The types of musical behaviours we refer to here are broad, ranging from performance on an instrument and listening expertise, to the ability to employ music in functional settings or to c...

Many people enjoy music daily, but in a very passive way. To more actively enjoy music, some novel musical instruments are necessary. As a candidate for a novel musical instrument, we propose a networked wearable musical instrument. This paper describes the design of the networked musical instrument as well as a prototype system. Furthermore, we demonstrate several possible novel applications o...