Computer Music Research Articles

Catwalk goes techno (wearable technologies)

This paper discusses the developments and applications of wearable technologies. People in the very near future will have a whole range of small devices incorporated into their clothing or stuck to their bodies as clever sticking plasters. Much of the research into wearable electronics is focused on medical applications. An obvious extension of this idea is to use such devices to monitor performance and health of people during exercise. Beyond health and wellbeing applications, companies are also looking at incorporating lifestyle devices, such as music players and computers, into clothing. The defence industry is interested in wearable electronics to conceal communication devices in a soldier's clothing. Some of the challenges in incorporating electronics into clothing is the choice of fibre and power source. Cost is another important factor for wearable devices. Despite all the great advances in wearable electronics, there are still some issues to be resolved. Security issues have been considered extensively for mobile telecoms, but it is not yet known whether others might be able to tap into the wealth of personal information being gathered and communicated around our bodies via our clothes.

Division- and Addition-Based Models of Rhythm in a Computer-Assisted Composition System

Reading descriptions of different musical traditions or of the practice of different individual composers, it is not uncommon to see a rhythmic idiom described as additive/7 meaning in simple terms that it consists of durations formed by combining, or adding together, the units provided by a rapid underlying pulse (Koetting 1970; Pratt 1987; Clayton 2000). Such a characterization distinguishes the rhythmic idiom from others involving the division of the units of some referential pulse into variable numbers of smaller parts, an important feature of tonal Western classical music (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983). My present concern is not the ability of additionor division-based models of rhythm to accurately describe existing musical traditions, but the value of these models as a basis for generating rhythms in an algorithmic-composition system, in which potentially novel rhythmic idioms may be sought. In particular, I will describe a series of algorithms I have used in my own work as a composer, and I will investigate some of the advantages and disadvantages each of these algorithms inherits from the particular model of rhythm on which it is based. The development of these algorithms was shaped by at least two compositional goals to create music for human performance, and to express it using common-practice Western music notation (Byrd 1994). My investigations will be made in the context of the same goals. For the sake of making the distinction between the two types of models clearer, Figure 1 presents simple illustrations of rhythms generated by purely addition-based and purely division-based means. In Figure la, the upper row of the diagram represents a stream of timespans constituting the units of some isochronous pulse. The lower row of this diagram shows these timespans grouped into durations of 3, 5, 3, 2, 5, and 2 units to constitute the resulting rhythm. (These values are labeled in the diagram, but of course we could also count unit pulses to determine them.) Although the resulting rhythm lacks the isochrony of the original unit pulse, we can treat it like another pulse and combine adjacent timespans to form larger durations. In this way, the additive process is capable of forming hierarchies of timespans deeper than the two levels illustrated here.

The Sound and Music Computing Field: Present and Future

This paper is a general introduction for the theme of this special issue. It attempts to give a definition of the Sound and Music Computing research field stemming from its methodologies, aims and approaches. A brief account of the disciplines involved along with their academic organization follows, along with a short description of the areas of application involved. Since Sound and Music Computing has recently enjoyed a deep world-wide reflection upon its own goals, visions and perspectives which has resulted in several roadmapping exercises, the last part of this article provides a summary of these exercises by introducing them in the context in which they were created.

The Societal Contexts for Sound and Music Computing: Research, Education, Industry, and Socio-Culture

The paper addresses the various contexts that determine the societal framework for research in the field of sound and music computing. Four of these contexts are identified, namely, the research context, the educational context, the industrial context and the socio-cultural context. For each context, the major trends are analysed and summarized as short statements, thus providing a background in which the state-of-the-art and the challenges of sound and music research can be situated.

Impressions from the SMC Roadmap

A broad view of our field is offered in A Roadmap for Sound and Music Computing. However, additional topics should be considered. The roadmap could go further by suggesting study and involvement in economic and policy analysis. Also, the roadmap does not stress the importance of tool building to support the discipline. It could be beneficial to address directly the issues of ‘‘high'' art vs. entertainment and popular culture, and the field should work to adopt both under the unifying theme of sound and music computing. Because the field tends to be dispersed both in terms of specializations and geography, the potential for collaboration is especially important. These and other topics are discussed in relation to the roadmap.

Sound and Music Computing: Research Trends and Some Key Issues

This contribution attempts to give an overview of current research trends and open research problems in the rich field of Sound and Music Computing (SMC). To that end, the field is roughly divided into three large areas related to Sound, Music, and Interaction, respectively, and within each of these, major research trends are briefly described. In addition, for each sub-field a small number of open research (or research strategy) issues are identified that should be addressed in order to further advance the SMC field.

A Reconstruction of Stria

75 John Chowning’s computer-music composition Stria premiered on 13 October 1977 in Paris, during the “Perspectives du XXe siecle” concerts. The work was commissioned in 1976 by Luciano Berio, who was then the director of IRCAM’s electroacoustic music department. John Chowning, who began thinking about this project in 1972 but without the possibility to experiment, returned to the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) and realized the piece from July to October 1977 using a DEC PDP-10 computer and the computer languages SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language) and MUSIC 10 (similar to Music IV). The term “stria” derives from the striated aspect of the work that is so apparent in the sonogram representation. Stria is an historical piece for a number of reasons. Not least among these is its use of the intrinsic attributes of sound synthesis by frequency modulation, discovered by the composer ten years before, to structure inharmonic spectra in an ordered manner that is complementary to a nontraditional pitch space. Both the spectra and the pitch space are rooted in the Golden Ratio from antiquity (Bossis 2005). Computer-synthesized music does not require, literally speaking, traditional scores or performers. Its existence depends on techniques and devices that are not dedicated to music and become quickly obsolete. As a result, this raises two essential problems: reproduction of works and analysis of sources. (See the article by Laura Zattra in this issue; Zattra 2007.) Therefore, there is a risk that the most “ancient” music (computer music celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) may not only freeze forever in its original and low-quality recording but also become baffling even for specialists. By reconstructing Stria, I sought this double purpose: to clone the original work in a high-quality format, as well as including the possibility to modify its parameters to analyze the process. I have therefore created a computer program for reconstructing Stria, one whose interface is easy to control and customize. The complete source code will be made available on the Web; see ccrma.stanford.edu/pieces/chowning/stria.

Sound and Music Computing: Challenges and Strategies

Based on the current context of the Sound and Music Computing (SMC) field, the state of the art in research and the open issues that have been identified and described in other articles of this journal issue, in this article we make a step forward and try to identify the broad SMC challenges and we propose strategies with which to tackle them. On the research side we identify a clear need for designing better sound objects and environments and for promoting research to understand, model, and improve human interaction with sound and music. In the education domain we feel the need for better training our multidisciplinary researchers and to make sure that they can contribute to the multicultural society we live in. There is also a clear need for improving the transferring of the knowledge and technologies generated by our community. Finally we claim that the SMC field should be very much concerned with its social context and that a number of current social concerns should be addressed. We accompany each of these challenges with strategies that should help researchers, educators and policy makers take specific actions to advance in the proposed SMC roadmap.

Evaluation Issue of KANSEI Technology and Sound and Music Computing Projects at Waseda University

Information technology can be classified into three categories; physical signal processing, semantic symbol processing and KANSEI (emotional) information processing. The technology for art belongs to the last one. The technology to access human emotion cannot be evaluated in the same way as the one for industrial applications. We need a sort of multilateral standard method to evaluate technical research on music and art that requires both universal and individual viewpoints. This paper begins with the evaluation issue of KANSEI technology related to music. Then our recent projects on music computing promoted by the Japan Science and Technology Agency are introduced.

Preface: Special Issue on the Future of Sound and Music Computing

Preface: Special Issue on the Future of Sound and Music Computing

Science and Technology of Music and Sound: The IRCAM Roadmap

This article presents the roadmap for the research and development activities at IRCAM for the period from 2007 to 2010. Published in the context of the achievement of the Sound and Music Computing Roadmap by the S2S2 Consortium, it aims to deliver an extensive and synthetic vision of the identified directions for the research at IRCAM, through noticeably the introduction of the unifying notion of representation levels of musical information. The addressed subjects include sound analysis/synthesis, physical models, sound spatialization, computer-aided composition, and interdisciplinary transversal themes concerning the links between the signal and symbolic worlds and more generally between different levels of music representations, the renewal of concepts underlying the management of time and interaction, and the issue of the elicitation and mediation of the musical knowledge.

Online Consumer Search Depth: Theories and New Findings

The continuous growth of e-commerce makes it critical for firms to understand consumers' search behavior so that e-commerce Web sites and the underlying information systems can be designed to better cater to consumers' needs. This paper extends the classic search model to analyze online consumer search behavior. The analytical results suggest how consumers' search depth is influenced by a variety of factors such as search cost, individual consumer difference, and product characteristics. Evidence is provided using clickstream data of online searches and purchases of music CDs, computer hardware, and airline tickets during the period from July 2002 to December 2002 collected by an Internet marketing company, ComScore Inc. Compared with the search depth reported in previous works, this study finds that consumers are searching more intensely before purchasing online. This reflects the evolution of Internet users and the growth of online retail business.

Formation of creative abilities of schoolboy’s by means of new musical computer programs

The nature of concept "of creative capacities” is uncovered the ways of their formation for the schoolboys at lessons of music are esteemed in this article. The modem approach in realization of lessons of music with usage of new computer programs is offered.

Code Jamming

Code Jamming

Recurrent Neural Networks for Music Computation

Some researchers in the computational sciences have considered music computation, including music reproduction and generation, as a dynamic system, i.e., a feedback process. The key element is that the state of the musical system depends on a history of past states. Recurrent (neural) networks have been deployed as models for learning musical processes. We first present a tutorial discussion of recurrent networks, covering those that have been used for music learning. Following this, we examine a thread of development of these recurrent networks for music computation that shows how more intricate music has been learned as the state of the art in recurrent networks improves. We present our findings that show that a long short-term memory recurrent network, with new representations that include music knowledge, can learn musical tasks, and can learn to reproduce long songs. Then, given a reharmonization of the chordal structure, it can generate an improvisation.

From the Guest Editor—Special Cluster on Computation in Music

The issues in computational modeling of music have risen to the forefront due to the massive, and rapidly growing, amount of music that is now available in digital format. Propelled by the industry’s demand for content-based music indexing, for retrieval and recommendation systems, and for techniques to manipulate and create music for mobile phones, games, and other applications, and fueled by academia’s more established musicological and pedagogical interests, the need for new algorithms and models to better understand, create, and evaluate music has never been greater. This increase in music and computing research is evidenced from the proliferation of new conferences in this area, such as the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (founded 2000), the Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval Conference (founded 2003), and the Sound and Music Computing Conference (founded 2004), to name a few. The operations research community is not far behind in this respect; I have organized several sessions on music at recent INFORMS conferences. In 2003, the INFORMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta featured a special cluster of three invited sessions devoted to OR in the Arts: Applications in Music; the 9th INFORMS Computing Society conference in Annapolis, MD in 2005 showcased two invited sessions entitled Music, Computation and Artificial Intelligence. One might ask: What has OR got to do with music and computing? The definitions of OR range from the textbook coverage of techniques such as mathematical (including linear, nonlinear, integer, mixedinteger, dynamic) programming and stochastic methods (including Markov modeling and queuing theory) to Richard Larson’s “common-sense approach to problems” with the value added of OR being “the correct framing and formulation of the problem” (OR/MS Today, December 2004). Regardless of the choice of definition, OR is very much part of computation in music today. For example, music-to-score alignment can be modeled and solved using dynamic programming, and the problem of separating voices in polyphonic music can be framed as an optimization problem to be solved using local search techniques. Together with the cluster’s three distinguished associate editors, Roger Dannenberg, Joel Sokol, and Mark Steedman, I am pleased to present to you a selection of five papers on a range of topics in this special cluster on computation in music. The first three articles focus on music description and analysis, followed by papers on music improvisation and evaluation of retrieval systems. The article by Darrell Conklin and Christina Anagnostopoulou proposes a viewpoints method for knowledge representation of segmented melodies that allows for melodic analysis at different levels of abstraction. The proposed method can serve as a tool for stylistic analysis, synthesis, and classification. The authors demonstrate that the viewpoints method facilitates the discovery of recurrent patterns in large collections. The article by Emilia Gomez focuses on tonal description of polyphonic audio. Tonal features can be used in similarity assessment and to index digital collections. The author proposes a method for extracting a tonal descriptor, a vector called a harmonic pitch class profile, from polyphonic audio signals, and applies the proposed description to audio key finding. The article by Elaine Chew describes the spiral array model for tonality and gives an overview of algorithms for key finding, pitch spelling, and tonal segmentation based on this model. The paper introduces the Argus algorithm, a linear-time method, for automatic segmentation by tonal context. These algorithms provide a set of tools for describing the tonal patterns of music encoded in numeric form. In the next article, Judy Franklin summarizes the state of the art in the use of recurrent neural networks for generating music and presents a recurrent neural network that can learn both longand short-term structures in music. The proposed network is applied to jazz improvisation to generate new melodies from the original, given an alternate sequence of chords.

ACM MM Workshop on Audio and Music Computing for Multimedia

Multimedia is usually defined as the combination of text, graphics, full-motion video, and sound into an integrated application. The final frontier, sound, which includes general-purpose audio, music, and speech, is an integral, but often neglected, component of the field. Traditionally, the audio and the image research communities have developed independently, and almost in perfect isolation one with another. Even though there exist many important audio conferences and societies, general venues such as the ACM Multimedia Conference still attract relatively low participation from the audio and music community. Our goal is to set a new trend of active contribution by the audio and music community through the initiating of a workshop on Audio and Music Computing for Multimedia (AMCMM), specifically targeted to researchers in this community.

La innovación en el ámbito de la gestión cultural, un ejemplo concreto

The CDMC (Center for the Diffusion of Contemporary Music) was created in 1983 to promote contemporary music in Spain. Amongs its activities, the Alicante International Festival of Contemporary Music, a regular concert series in Madrid and the Musical Electronics and Computing Laboratory. In the 2005/06 season, the CDMC settles in the new Auditorium at the extension of the Reina Sofia National Museum of Contemporary Art; this new location permits to organize a more ambitious concert series. The cycle of four concerts called “Residences”, a section of this program, sets a model of organization that joins together several ensembles and soloists in a common eagerness. New proposals of innovation in the organization of concerts have arisen in this cycle, as a structure to discusse how (...) to coordinate further on the group of musicians devoted to contemporary music.

Electronic and Computer Music (review)

Electronic and Computer Music (review)

Alternative venues for computer music: SoundGallery_Living Room_ARTSHIP

The audience for contemporary classical music is small – the audience for computer music is even smaller. Traditional concert halls are failing to generate interest in new instrumental music, much less computer music, while museums are having much more success with new art, including art with a technological component. By marketing our music to art galleries and museums, we can reach an audience predisposed to accept the new and unusual in artistic expression. Presenting the works of music outside a traditional proscenium setting also helps shatter any a priori definitions of ‘music’ audiences may hold. Using the term ‘Sound Art’ instead of ‘music’ may also help to free people struggling to appreciate unfamiliar sounds.