Melodic Phrases Research Articles

INTERAKSI MUSIKAL MELALUI GESTUR DAN VERBAL DALAM MUSIK JAZZ

ABSTRACT This paper explains a process of musical interaction in jazz music performances, on the performances of Solo Jazz Society musicians in Surakarta. The focus of this paper is about (1) how the process of musical interaction between Sojazz musicians occurs and (2) what factors cause musical interaction between Sojazz musicians. With the aim (1) to know how the process of musical interactions between Sojazz musicians occur and (2) to know the factors that cause the musical interactions between Sojazz musicians. The research method used is qualitative with descriptive analysis approach. n the performance, Sojazz musicians perform musical interactions between musicians through two forms of process. Gesture interactions that include eye contact, hand code, head jerking, lip reading and overall body posture are applied as cues while improvising. The second form of the process is through the musical interaction itself which is Accompaniment, melodic phrase and rhythmic motif, tension growth, and trade four. The process of musical interaction applied by Sojazz musicians as mentioned above, is through gesture used to create mutual interaction between musicians. Kata kunci : Solo Jazz Society, interaksi musikal jazz,

Joseph Johnson's Hat, or, The Storm on Tower Hill

Joseph Johnson's Hat, or, The Storm on Tower Hill Oskar Cox Jensen (bio) Because they take place over time, containing more text and music than is convenient to reproduce in passing, we refer to songs synecdochally: formally by title or first line, informally (or forgetfully) by a melodic phrase or part of a refrain. Because they are usually small things, songs themselves are synecdochal. Any performance of a song has the capacity to enfold a host of times and places within the moments of its own happening. In this article, I will focus on one man's performance of a single song, in order not to contract but to expand our sense of the dimensions a song might contain. My process is, at heart, the unpacking of another synecdoche: the one Georgian writers, later scholars, and many of my own close colleagues have taken to calling "the man with the ship on his head." This man, Joseph Johnson—a disabled ex-sailor, ballad-singer, and busker of Afro-Caribbean origins—has fascinated many over the past two centuries. First documented by the antiquarian John Thomas Smith in an 1815 print and his 1817 study of London street figures Vagabondiana, Johnson was repeatedly referenced in accounts of street life and ballad culture throughout the nineteenth century.1 Like many of London's poorest performers, he was more often exoticized than understood by contemporary writers: used as a cipher, or reduced to the dimension most of interest to the writer. In recent years, the figure of Johnson has reappeared in British culture, with cameo appearances on page and screen.2 Modern scholars [End Page 545] have situated him productively within a broader racial and colonial context: Kwame Dawes, Mark Stein, and Eddie Chambers have each interrogated his London performances; Peter Reed and Kathleen Wilson have both discussed him with reference to the history of Jonkonnu.3 Yet, since none of these accounts have made him their focus, an understanding of Johnson as an individual still eludes us. And while recent scholars have explored the resonance between the vessel on Johnson's head and the transatlantic slave trade, I would like to try to understand what his performance might have meant in all its dimensions, to himself as well as to others. Rather than frame this as a rescue from the condescension of both posterity, and some of his contemporaries, I would prefer to think of this as an engagement with the multiplicities of song culture. To understand a song in a global city like Regency London, we must travel: to Jamaica and Versailles, and perhaps even Australia. We must also travel in time. Such is the nature of a performance like Johnson's—represented, recalled, misunderstood—that the thread leading to its center only unravels when tugged from its end: in this case, 2017. Here is an excerpt from the script of a major television series: 10:04:25 On screen caption on black screen London 1814. 10:04:32 EXT. WAPPING WALL LANE, WAPPING—DAY It is afternoon in the busy dockside street. [. . .]We are taken along by a STREET BEGGAR. Strapped to his head he has a perfect replica of an English naval battleship, made from sticks and paper and leather. It is twice as big as his head and he balances it with care. He is accompanied by a gang of delighted children who follow him barefoot and hoot and laugh at his words as he chants out a rhyme. . . Suddenly they stop. They have seen something coming.4 From its opening credits, the 2017 BBC TV series Taboo nails its colors to the mast: Regency London is a global city. Though the program's aesthetics owe more to a steampunk take on Victoriana, and though its plot and [End Page 546] dialogue are cavalier with anachronisms, its vision is in one sense more historically percipient than most period dramas, in conceiving of London as being in dialogue with both west and east—from the respective ends of the metropolis itself, to North America, Africa, and Asia. Throughout its six-episode first season, Taboo develops a critique of the British slave trade, gradually expanding its scope...

Melody2Vec: Distributed Representations of Melodic Phrases based on Melody Segmentation

Melody2Vec: Distributed Representations of Melodic Phrases based on Melody Segmentation

Expressiveness in Music From a Multimodal Perspective

This article seeks to unveil quantitative relations between the patterns of movement recurrence of a group of expert clarinetists and expressive sonic manipulations they employ during their performances. The main hypothesis is that the recurrent ancillary gestures of musicians are closely related to their sounded expressive intentions, and that the expressive content imposed by them according to the music structure is reflected in their movement patterns. To conduct this multimodal investigation of expressiveness in music, movement and audio analyses of several clarinet performances of excerpts in the classical repertoire are presented and discussed in conjunction. The results show strong correlations between the recurrence pattern of clarinetists’ ancillary movements and expressive manipulations of timing, timbre, and loudness associated with melodic phrasing and harmonic and dynamic transitions in the performed music excerpts.

Schrödinger’s notes: a minimalist equation for a Reckless Sleepers project

ABSTRACTThis article explores the inherent musicality of Reckless Sleepers’ theatre work by reflecting on the compositional principles that guide the company’s creative process. Focussing on the complex structure of the performance Schrödinger (2011-present), and drawing on the author’s involvement as a performer and devisor on the project, the article provides an alternative dramaturgical reading of the processing and organisation of performance material through its relationship to minimalist composition and philosophy. Seeking to identify the score of Schrödinger as a series of musical ‘notes’, motifs, and melodic phrases that are continually repeated, re-organised, and re-iterated, the author unpacks his own journey through the creation and performance of the work with an emphasis on the structural integrity and signifying potential of the material being ‘played’. This article argues that the prioritising of form, style, and tone in the making of Schrödinger are central to an understanding of Reckless Sleepers’ practice; one that intentionally places a discussion on meaning at a distance during the creative process and that concentrates on the function of material from a structural, or musical, perspective.

Действие принципа нонселекции в языковoй организации постмодерного художественного текста

The article discusses the organization of linguistic postmodern literary text. Analyzes the poetic works of Ukrainian postmodern art discourse for selection by the authors of language means of expression to achieve communicative goals. Word in a work of art does not only nominative function, it is used in a subjectify lingual space and determine speechthinking freedom of speaker. The author draws attention to the fact that the poetic function of language, along with the reference, ambiguity and gives it an opportunity for the ambiguity of the utterance. In connection with this understanding of the meaning of art depends on the different attitudes to the very subject of the statement saying, an the method of reading the text. Related words in the concept of becoming unfit for the image “literal” pattern of life. Therefore, a clear sign of postmodernism become Ukrainian verbal games, heteroglossy languages, discourse, linguistic hybrids, marginal dictionaries. He rejects the discourse of a totalitarian society, the official lexicon of Soviet-style language as inadequate to express the individual senses and feelings, instead of resorting to repetition of words, obscene language, citations, etc. The essence of the product is replaced by rhythmic melodic phrase, a phrase open to freely attach to it any associative chain. In the process of generation of artistic expression is present in the selection principle nonselection linguistic means of expression. The dialogue is born and polylogue game between the text of culture, the reader, the author.

Introducing motion-capturing technology into the music practice room as a feedback tool for working towards the precision of rubato

Motion-capturing technology has been traditionally used in the field of sports for the analysis of athletes’ body movements. The application of this multimodal tool to the field of musical pedagogy, however, has yet to be widely explored. Historically, music teachers have been using abstract language such as thick lines, for example, to describe melodic phrases. These thick lines can function as mental signposts or cues to help a performer navigate through a particular piece especially during performances. Concepts such as rubato – the stretching of time – for instance, are more challenging to describe in terms of concrete lines or shapes, however. Because the push and pull of rubato is so subtle, it can sometimes be challenging to pinpoint rubato and maximize its effectiveness. Thus, in addition to listening to the coach’s verbal explanations, it can be helpful to see the teacher’s gestures displayed simultaneously alongside their students’ gestures during music lessons. The Leapmotion software provides visual feedback in real time and can be played back in slow motion. This device functions much like a mirror, as the performers’ gestures reflect onto the screen in real time. At the same time, their teacher’s gestures can also be juxtaposed onto the screen as a reference. Details of the speed and the precision of the rubato timing can be seen on the screen as well. More importantly, Leapmotion can be a useful source of feedback in the practice room where the teacher is not present; students can record precise gestures during their lessons and revisit what they had learned when they are alone. In this sense, students would not feel lost in the practice room during the week, and they could also hone their music analysis skills through the examination of their body movements. This study aims to catalyse the learning process and to revolutionize the traditional methods of daily music practice.

Discovery of Repeated Melodic Phrases in Folk Singing Recordings

In music, repetition is a fundamental concept to establish structure and create temporal relationships. Previous approaches to detecting repetition in music recordings have mainly focused on discovering repeated patterns of variable length and instrumentation at arbitrary locations. In this paper, we present a novel method for the discovery of repeated sung phrases in folk music recordings and, in particular, in oral music traditions, where written scores are usually unavailable. At a first stage, a segmentation algorithm partitions automatically generated note-level transcriptions of the singing melody into sections that correspond to the structural unit of a phrase. A clustering algorithm is then used to form clusters of phrases, where each cluster contains instances of the same melodic content. The clustering algorithm operates on the basis of a distance measure between melodic sequences and, to this end, various melodic distance measures are investigated. A detailed evaluation procedure is used to assess the performance of the algorithm on three different European music traditions and the influence of transcription and segmentation errors is investigated. The proposed system is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art in audio-based approaches to repeated phrase discovery for this task.

Top-Down Modulation on the Perception and Categorization of Identical Pitch Contours in Speech and Music.

Whether pitch in language and music is governed by domain-specific or domain-general cognitive mechanisms is contentiously debated. The aim of the present study was to investigate whether mechanisms governing pitch contour perception operate differently when pitch information is interpreted as either speech or music. By modulating listening mode, this study aspired to demonstrate that pitch contour perception relies on domain-specific cognitive mechanisms, which are regulated by top–down influences from language and music. Three groups of participants (Mandarin speakers, Dutch speaking non-musicians, and Dutch musicians) were exposed to identical pitch contours, and tested on their ability to identify these contours in a language and musical context. Stimuli consisted of disyllabic words spoken in Mandarin, and melodic tonal analogs, embedded in a linguistic and melodic carrier phrase, respectively. Participants classified identical pitch contours as significantly different depending on listening mode. Top–down influences from language appeared to alter the perception of pitch contour in speakers of Mandarin. This was not the case for non-musician speakers of Dutch. Moreover, this effect was lacking in Dutch speaking musicians. The classification patterns of pitch contours in language and music seem to suggest that domain-specific categorization is modulated by top–down influences from language and music.

A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity by Gary Tomlinson

Reviewed by: A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity by Gary Tomlinson Bo Lawergren A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. By Gary Tomlinson. New York: Zone Books, 2015. [ 362 p. ISBN 9781935408659 (hardcover), $29.95; ISBN 9781935408680 (e-book), $20.95.] Illustrations, bibliographic references, index. Why start the inquiry one million years ago? Some fifty-five years ago Jacques Chailley chose a much shorter time span in his book 40,000 ans de musique: L’homme à la découverte de la musique (Paris: Plon, 1961). At that time, Homo sapiens was assumed not to date much further back. But much has been learned since then, and Tomlinson starts his musical clock when the first stone tools appeared. These Acheulean cleavers and hand axes set hominins on an evolutionary path, which eventually led to music about 900,000 years later. It was a long period during which human faculties adapted to music. The last half-century has seen much progress in evolutionary studies in academic fields such as archaeology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, music cognition, ethology, primatology, linguistics, and semiotics. Tomlinson cuts a fascinating path through these quickly expanding scholarly fields and ably guides us through the thicket. His list of references is exhaustive and relevant. The account is based on the Darwinian principle of selection-with-variation, which has become the agreed path for evolutionary studies in general. It is good to see it integrated into the study of music. According to Tomlinson this biological approach needs to be combined with a measure of cultural behavior. Otherwise the procedure may boil down to a simple contest of nature vs. nurture, which would be “at best misleading, [and] at worst utterly distorting in the analysis of just about everything interesting that humans are up to” (p. 13). In his view music emerged in a “biocultural coevolution.” There are seven chapters. Each deals with a central idea and is tied to a broad time slot. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of feedback. As in circuit theory, feedback can be positive or negative, giving an enhancing or a repressive effect. In an organism, the feedback occurs when it modifies the environment, and the organism reacts to the new situation. The positive feedback is tied to phenomena Tomlinson calls epicycles—unfortunately, not clearly defined in the book. (To be sure, they are unrelated to the astronomical epicycles made [End Page 131] famous by Ptolemy in the second century A.D.) The Acheulean stone tools (mentioned earlier) are dealt with in chapter 2 (“1,000,000 Years Ago”). They date between 1.8 and 0.1 million years before present. Already the earliest ones have quite symmetric shapes, a design choice conforming to later hominin preference. Chapter 3 (“500,000 Years Ago”) discusses proto-discourse through vocalization and gesture but without language. It is needed to establish coordination and build complexity from simple foundations. Here Tomlinson reviews features that nourished the social brain, such as the advantage of living in groups and cooperating in hunting. This allows hominins to hunt and outwit megafauna. In turn, the food nurtured the brain. The ability to organize large groups favored the social brain. Chapter 4 (“250,000 Years Ago”): hierarchical thinking was probably introduced at this stage. It preceded the conception of proper language, when vocabularies and grammars were established. By establishing hierarchical structures, vocabularies could be reduced to manageable size and sorted into categories. With these techniques, human memories could more easily cope with large vocabularies. By inventing grammatical rules, many sentences could be formed on similar patterns, making them easier to construct and understand. Such techniques were also useful in developing music, which involved similar hierarchical concepts. Using recursive patterns, short melodic phrases could be expanded into longer ones. Rhythmic phrases, too, could be lengthened through repetition. Abstraction lay near at hand, and societal concepts, such as kinship and religion, may have appeared at this stage. In chapter 5 (“100,000 Years Ago”) symbolic cognition followed as an outgrowth of abstraction. Ability to handle symbolic representations is often seen as a dividing line between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens). Extant flutes are discussed in chapter 7 (“100,000...

Relating movement recurrence and expressive timing patterns in music performances.

In this study the movement patterns of ten expert musicians are quantitatively related to expressive timing patterns and the music structure during performances. The hypothesis is that ancillary gestures recurrently employed are closely related to expressive intentions, and that the expressive content imposed in key musical passages is thus reflected in the patterns of gestural recurrence. A movement and an audio analysis of 30 clarinet performances of a Brahms' excerpt are compared. Results show direct correlations between the recurrence pattern of clarinetists' ancillary movements and expressive bar duration manipulations employed by them, associated with melodic phrasing and harmonic transitions.

Meter and Word Setting: Revisiting Machaut’s Monophonic Virelais

Monophonic virelais constitute a significant proportion of Guillaume de Machaut's compositions in the formes fixes; together with the complainte and chanson roial of the Remede de Fortune and the lais, they represent the zenith of a medium which has not since been pursued with either such creative variety or such compositional resource. At first glance, the virelais seem simple, naIve even. Yet closer analytical attention has revealed that they harbor a range of sophistications, whether a subtle interplay of melodic phrase and poetic line,! or a variety of different tonal procedures and motivic reworkings. 2 This is no surprise given the remarkable technical skill and creative imagination of Machaut's other compositions. But it is a timely reminder that the monophonic songs are an integral part of his lyric output, rather than a marginal curiosity betraying indebtedness to the trouvere tradition at a time when the lyric genres were focused on the development of polyphony. The transcriptions of the monophonic virelais given in the two extant complete editions of Machaut's music 3 are nearly identical in substantive matters, and the manuscript sources differ very little in the texts that they present of them. 4 The word underlay, which can be one of the most trouble­ some causes of variants in the melismatic polyphonic songs, is on the whole clearly indicated. Even where it is sometimes unclear-as in A, for example; see Earp (1983:220)-the generally syllabic manner of the word setting makes the intended alignment of poem and music easy to recover. Despite the basic textual consensus of the two editions, there is one area of tran­ scription on which they disagree: that of meter. Eighteen of the monopho­ nic virelais are notated in major-imperfect tempus, and the other seven are in minor-imperfect tempus. Friedrich Ludwig's edition differs from Leo Schrade's in transcribing seven of the songs (six of which have minor-im­ perfect tempus) also in imperfect modus. Schrade's eschewal of the modus level is characteristic of his edition as a whole, and is indicative of an edito­ rial retreat from the imposition of anything that might seem to result from subjective judgment in the transcription of old notations into new. s Any decision about the use of the modus level in the virelais arises from a consideration of its metrical function, since longs are not present in the rhythmic notation. The regular tempus groupings that satisfied Schrade in

Jimmy Blanton의 연주기법과 스타일에 관한 연구

본 논문은 재즈역사상 가장 처음으로 모던한 베이스 연주 스타일을 선보였던 베이스 연주인 Jimmy Blanton의 연주기법과 스타일에 관한 논문이다. 콘트라베이스가 사용된 이래 Jimmy Blanton 이전 시대의 베이스의 연주 특징이라고 한다면 2비트 또는 4비트의 단순한 라인들의 반복이라 할 수 있다. 즉 기본적인 리듬과 근음(Root Note)을 바탕으로 연결함으로써 화음을 보조해주는 역할 이외에 솔로나 멜로디적인 라인들이 나타나고 있지 않았다. 이러한 전통적인 베이스연주 스타일의 개념을 바꾸어놓은 인물이 바로 Jimmy Blanton 이다. 그는 New Orleans Jazz 이후 가장처음으로 모던한 베이스의 연주스타일과 기법을 선보인 연주자이다. 단순한 Two Beat 스타일의 반주에서 4Beat를 바탕으로 Triplet리듬과 같은 다양한 리듬적 프레이즈를 반주에 도입하였으며 Horn과 같은 솔로 악기의 연주 스타일을 베이스로도 연주할 수 있음을 보여주었다. 이후 Ray Brown, Paul Chambers와 같은 거물급의 재즈연주인 들에게서도 그의 연주스타일이 이어지고 있음을 알 수 있다.본 논문에서는 그가 연주했던 곡들 중 Cotton Tail과 MR.JB Blues를 중심으로 반주와 솔로 기법에 관해 분석해 보았다. 전형적인 Root중심의 연주에서 벗어나 스케일을 사용해 Target Note를 향해 연주해가는 기법, 코드톤과 아르페지오를 이용한 프레이즈, 멜로디적인 솔로 연주 스타일, 질문과 대답형식 등 오늘날 우리들이 사용하는 다양한 베이스 연주 기법들이 Jimmy Blanton을 통해 이미 완성되었음을 알 수 있다. This is the Study of the Bass performance of the Jimmy Blanton who is first pioneer of Jazz Style Bass playing. Since the contrabass is using in jazz Performances Before jimmy Blanton, playing technique was mainly played repeatedly with simply two or four Beat with Root or 5th degree of Chord Tone. In Other words, there was only root based Note along with Harmony which doesn't have Bass Solos or Melodic phrase Appeared in Bass playing. Jimmy Blanton Was the First Bass Player who changes This Traditional Concept of Jazz bass playing after New Orleans Jazz era. He was introduced variety of accompaniment Style with Various rhythmic phrase and Bass Soloing like a horn Player. We could know that His Style Continues to Such as Ray Brown, Paul chambers who has a big Name after Jimmy Blanton. I analyzed accompaniment Style and solo techniques Of Jimmy Blanton with the Song "Cotton tail and MR.JB Blues" Which He Performed with Duke Ellington. I learned a lot while I'm analyzing his Performing Style from Jimmy Blanton, such as Target Note playing, using Chord Tones and Arpeggios, Melodic Solo Style, Jazz Style Bowing Technique, Question and Answer Phrasing etc. I could notice That He Was the true Pioneer of the First Bass player In the Early Jazz days.

A computational analysis of Turkish makam music based on a probabilistic characterization of segmented phrases

This study targets automatic analysis of Turkish makam music pieces on the phrase level. While makam is most simply defined as an organization of melodic phrases, there has been very little effort to computationally study melodic structure in makam music pieces. In this work, we propose an automatic analysis algorithm that takes as input symbolic data in the form of machine-readable scores that are segmented into phrases. Using a measure of makam membership for phrases, our method outputs for each phrase the most likely makam the phrase comes from. The proposed makam membership definition is based on Bayesian classification and the algorithm is specifically designed to process the data with overlapping classes. The proposed analysis system is trained and tested on a large data set of phrases obtained by transferring phrase boundaries manually written by experts of makam music on printed scores, to machine-readable data. For the task of classifying all phrases, or only the beginning phrases to come from the main makam of the piece, the corresponding F-measures are .52 and .60 respectively.

Singing emotionally: a study of pre-production, production, and post-production facial expressions.

Singing involves vocal production accompanied by a dynamic and meaningful use of facial expressions, which may serve as ancillary gestures that complement, disambiguate, or reinforce the acoustic signal. In this investigation, we examined the use of facial movements to communicate emotion, focusing on movements arising in three epochs: before vocalization (pre-production), during vocalization (production), and immediately after vocalization (post-production). The stimuli were recordings of seven vocalists' facial movements as they sang short (14 syllable) melodic phrases with the intention of communicating happiness, sadness, irritation, or no emotion. Facial movements were presented as point-light displays to 16 observers who judged the emotion conveyed. Experiment 1 revealed that the accuracy of emotional judgment varied with singer, emotion, and epoch. Accuracy was highest in the production epoch, however, happiness was well communicated in the pre-production epoch. In Experiment 2, observers judged point-light displays of exaggerated movements. The ratings suggested that the extent of facial and head movements was largely perceived as a gauge of emotional arousal. In Experiment 3, observers rated point-light displays of scrambled movements. Configural information was removed in these stimuli but velocity and acceleration were retained. Exaggerated scrambled movements were likely to be associated with happiness or irritation whereas unexaggerated scrambled movements were more likely to be identified as “neutral.” An analysis of singers' facial movements revealed systematic changes as a function of the emotional intentions of singers. The findings confirm the central role of facial expressions in vocal emotional communication, and highlight individual differences between singers in the amount and intelligibility of facial movements made before, during, and after vocalization.

Continuities and innovation in Luo song style: creating the Benga Beat in Kenya 1960 to 1995

Benga is a genre of guitar-band dance music in Kenya that first emerged within the Luo community during the late 1960s. Throughout its initial development among Luo bands and subsequent adaptation to several ethnic languages, benga provided many Kenyans with a malleable platform for enjoying a novel, emergent style that connected with the poetic and musical sensibilities of ethnic tradition that have been resilient in both rural and urban life. Each variant of benga expresses markers of its ethnic orientation, not only in the obvious sense of its language, but in concepts of rhythmic structure and melodic phrasing, tempo, form, and vocal timbre. They also present distinct developments in compositional identity initiated by various leading musicians. While these distinctions are obvious to benga musicians and fans, in scholarly and journalistic discussions of benga they are seldom discussed in a substantive way, and benga is often generalized as either a reflection of latent ethnic identities that persist in modern music, or a local derivative of Congolese music.

Automatic Ontology Generation for Musical Instruments Based on Audio Analysis

In this paper we present a novel hybrid system that involves a formal method of automatic ontology generation for web-based audio signal processing applications. An ontology is seen as a knowledge management structure that represents domain knowledge in a machine interpretable format. It describes concepts and relationships within a particular domain, in our case, the domain of musical instruments. However, the different tasks of ontology engineering including manual annotation, hierarchical structuring and organization of data can be laborious and challenging. For these reasons, we investigate how the process of creating ontologies can be made less dependent on human supervision by exploring concept analysis techniques in a Semantic Web environment. In this study, various musical instruments, from wind to string families, are classified using timbre features extracted from audio. To obtain models of the analysed instrument recordings, we use K-means clustering to determine an optimised codebook of Line Spectral Frequencies (LSFs), or Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). Two classification techniques based on Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) neural network and Support Vector Machines (SVM) were tested. Then, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) is used to automatically build the hierarchical structure of musical instrument ontologies. Finally, the generated ontologies are expressed using the Ontology Web Language (OWL). System performance was evaluated under natural recording conditions using databases of isolated notes and melodic phrases. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) were conducted with the feature and classifier attributes as independent variables and the musical instrument recognition F-measure as dependent variable. Based on these statistical analyses, a detailed comparison between musical instrument recognition models is made to investigate their effects on the automatic ontology generation system. The proposed system is general and also applicable to other research fields that are related to ontologies and the Semantic Web.

Moved through music: The effect of experienced emotions on performers’ movement characteristics

Do performers who feel sad move differently compared to those who express sadness? Although performers’ expressive movements have been widely studied, little is known about how performers’ experienced emotions affect such movements. To investigate this, we made 72 motion-capture recordings of eight violinists playing a melodic phrase in response to three different instructions. The first instruction was to focus on the technical aspects of playing. The second instruction was to give an expressive performance. Before the third instruction, performers were subjected to a mood induction task. Following this, performers played while focusing on their experienced emotions. After each playing condition, performers were interviewed about their thoughts and feelings. Analyses of the amount, speed, acceleration, and smoothness of movement revealed a different pattern of movement characteristics for each performance condition. In the expressive condition, the amount, speed, acceleration, and jerk of movement were highest. In the emotional condition, performers moved less, slower, and more smoothly. The findings of this exploratory study provide concrete evidence that performers’ experienced emotions affect the movement characteristics of their performance.

CHORD RECOGNITION USING NEURAL NETWORKS BASED ON PARTICLE SWARM OPTIMIZATION

A sequence of musical chords can facilitate musicians in music arrangement and accompaniment. To implement an intelligent system for chord recognition, in this article we propose a novel approach using artificial neural networks (ANN) trained bythe particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique and back-propagation (BP) learning algorithm. All of the training and testing data are generated from musical instrument digital interface (MIDI) symbolic data. Furthermore, in order to improve the recognition efficiency, an additional feature of cadencesis included. In other words, cadence is not only the structural punctuation of a melodic phrase but is considered as the important feature for chord recognition. Experimental results of our proposed approach show that adding a cadence feature significantly improves recognition rate, and the ANN-PSO method outperforms ANN-BP in chord recognition. In addition, because preliminary experimental recognition rates are generally not stable enough, we chose the optimal ANNs to propose a two-phase ANN model to integrate the results among many models.

Why Do Jazz Musicians Swing Their Eighth Notes?

In jazz, the function of durational inequality at the eighth-note level is the production of anacrusis on the offbeats, thereby generating the sense of forward propulsion and drive thought to typify the rhythmic quality known as “swing.” The common use of relatively “straight” eighth notes by improvising soloists helps to sustain forward momentum, whereas the less even, triplet-like “swing” eighth notes used more frequently by drummers facilitate the perception of a quarter-note beat. Varying the Beat-Upbeat Ratio (BUR)—i.e., moving between straight and swing eighth notes—enables jazz musicians to manipulate the flow of motional energy across a phrase in systematic ways in conjunction with other melodic processes. Analyses of melodic phrases by John Coltrane, Lee Konitz, and Sonny Clark reveal the centrality of such aspects of microrhythmic expression to the affective power of jazz improvisation.