Music Machine Research Articles

What Would We like to See Our Music Machines Capable of Doing?

What Would We like to See Our Music Machines Capable of Doing?

A View from the Bus: When Machines Make Music

musical arenas, as often happens when they begin to use computers to make music, issues which they never worried about before start to crystallize into cares and concerns. What follows1 is an attempt to say something about these issues. For want of a better term I'll call these concerns the social context of machine-made music. With all the junk that occupies our workbench when we enter the digital domain-neural nets, FIR filters, quantization errors, and so on-why worry about social issues as well? I contend that the history of Western music is one which is marked by consistent, and largely unsuccessful, attempts to build music machines. But now that we have finally succeeded in this, the nature of human musical relations is consequently changing-profoundly-and it goes without saying that music will change profoundly as well. Fundamentally,

The music machine: Selected readings from ?computer music journal?

Computer applications to music cover a very large field. This book is a collection of articles, previously published in Computer Music Journal, one of the most respected journals in the field, which deal with some of the possible applications of automated tools in music. The book, edited by the one-time editor of the journal, consists of 54 contributions divided into eight chapters: “Interviews,” “Composition,” “The Midi Interface,” “Music Software,” “Synthesis and Signal Processing,” “ Signal Processing Hardware” and “Music and Artificial Intelligence.” In the first chapter, computer musicians are interviewed on their experience of using computers to produce sound or musical compositions and in the second, several composers describe their compositional experiments. The next four chapters focus on both hardware and software developments, mainly to process signals or to manipulate musical data. A few treat music printing or applications of stochastic processes to music or describe commercial packages. The last chapter, on AI and music, is surely the most interesting for people working in computational linguistics because it concerns problems, like formalizing knowledge, theory testing and so on, which linguistics and music share. The short but very interesting article by John Rothgeb, “Simulating Musical Skills by Digital Computer,” focuses on the use of the computer to analyze what the theories of unfigured bass lack. He implemented rules extracted from theoretical attempts to harmonize the bass part, but the resulting failures demonstrated the lack of explanatory power of the theory. Therefore, the computer can be used to investigate musical theories by implementing them and then redefining or improving them by studying the results obtained from observation of how the implementations work out. Another essay of interest in this chapter is John Rahn’s “On Some Computational Models of Music Theory” in which some theoretical and practical issues raised by other authors are discussed and criticized. Of interest from the computational linguist’s point of view would be the discussion and criticism of the possible relationship, proposed by Meehan (1980), between Schank’s Conceptual Dependency Theory and the theory of implication/realization worked

Are We Losing the Next Generation? A Strange Experience on a Poetry Course

Abstract This article is an attempt to record the experience of the attitudes and behaviour of a group of sixth‐form children of lesser academic ability, from a comprehensive school in the centre of Manchester on a poetry course in a remote rural setting in Yorkshire. The author compares them with his experience of two other groups of the same age, from Accrington College of Further Education, and finds that there is a difference at a deep level of unconscious response to adults. This showed itself in a strange inability to find and respect the rights of adults living in the same house, when the students wanted to play occult games at night, and when they wanted to play their ‘pop’ music machines. He believes that there may be deep effects on consciousness, of a continual bombardment by ‘pop’, film and television throughout childhood, generating some disturbance of the reality sense which in turn causes dissociation of the normal ‘confrontation’ necessary to adolescent development. One extraordinary featu...

Notes from Grainger museum, University Of Melbourne

Abstract Burnett Cross, now a senior science editor with Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, N.Y., from 1945 to 1961 assisted Percy Grainger in the development of machines to play Free Music. In March 1976 he visited Australia by courtesy of the Australian-American Educational Foundation to work on restoration of the Free Music machines in the Grainger Museum. On 23 March he delivered the 1976 Percy Grainger Lecture. A feature of the lecture was the presentation of Grainger's Free Music No. 1 as realised, on the Synthi 100 in the electronic music studio of the Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, by the Faculty's electronics technician, Les Craythorn. The Australian Broadcasting Commission filmed a television segment at the Museum during Burnett Cross's visit. The segment, Free Music, was screened on the Weekend Magazine programme on Sunday, 13 June.1

Melowriter, a digital music coding machine

Melowriter, a digital music coding machine