Music Production Research Articles

Green in blue

The global commodification of jazz (and indeed culture more generally) has contributed to significant and enduring environmental consequences. The various physical formats through which it has been disseminated have each employed by-products of the petrochemical industry in their production and distribution, and the environmental cost of digital streaming platforms has more recently been observed as contributing further to the carbon footprints of music producers and consumers. International and regional travel by touring artists and festival audiences has similarly been recognized as having negative environmental impacts through associated air, sea, and land transport emissions and through increased burden on host-location infrastructures. The environmental implications of culture have come increasingly under scrutiny as society becomes conscious of individual and collective contributions to, and imperative mitigations against, critical anthropogenic climate change. This article seeks to explore the machineries of jazz dissemination, foregrounding the festival as a place of coming together in celebration of music and community, and considers how the road ahead may look as we attempt to green our engagement with culture while safeguarding its intrinsic values and modes of experience. It questions, therefore, whether the art form that spearheaded the ways in which we currently interact with live and recorded music can similarly lead us in addressing urgent and necessary paradigm shifts in the means and methods of cultural production and consumption.

Editorial

This editorial was written as ongoing conflicts were unfolding in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and elsewhere. Heavy metal music has previously been considered as an evocative medium through which war and conflict can be conveyed and understood in a range of ways. Here, the authors discuss how several metal music studies have had a role in enabling people to reflect both on the nature of war and on its relationship with lived experience, notions of national identity, music production and scenes.

A general overview of methods for generating room impulse responses

The utilization of room impulse responses has proven valuable for both the acoustic assessment of indoor environments and music production. Various techniques have been devised over time to capture these responses. Although algorithmic solutions have been in existence since the 1970 s for generating synthetic reverberation in real time , they continue to be computationally demanding and in general lack the accuracy in comparison to measured authentic Room Impulse Responses (RIR). In recent times, machine learning has found application in diverse fields, including acoustics, leading to the development of techniques for generating RIRs. This paper provides a general overview, of approaches and methods for generating RIRs, categorized into algorithmic and machine learning techniques, with a particular emphasis on the latter. Discussion covers the acoustical attributes of rooms relevant to perceptual testing and methodologies for comparing RIRs. An examination of disparities between captured and generated RIRs is included to better delineate the key acoustic properties characterizing a room. The paper is designed to offer a foundational literature base for those interested in RIR generation for music production purposes, with future work considerations also explored.

Overview of the technical area in musical acoustics

Musical acoustics was launched as one of the first Technical Committees of the Acoustical Society of America. The Technical Committee in Musical Acoustics (TCMU) is concerned with applying science and technology to the field of music. The four main areas are (1) physics of musical sound production in musical instruments and the voice, (2) music perception and cognition, (3) analysis and synthesis of musical sounds and compositions, and (4) recording and reproduction technology. The scopes of areas have changed over time; for example, current interests in using groundbreaking methods in artificial intelligence and computational acoustics to solve problems. There is substantial interdisciplinary overlap with other technical committees, such as Architectural Acoustics and Physiological and Psychological Acoustics. Musical acoustic studies sometimes only require relatively moderate equipment. Thus, they lend themselves well as a research entry point for undergraduate and even high school students—especially since there is often a natural interest in music from early on. However, research in the field can also become very complex and often requires cultural understanding and listening skills to interpret technical results and direct research meaningfully. On the practical side, the TCMU sometimes organizes concerts to augment the technical sessions.

Blind search and flexible product visions: the sociotechnical shaping of generative music engines

AbstractAmidst the surge in AI-oriented commercial ventures, music is a site of intensive efforts to innovate. A number of companies are seeking to apply AI to music production and consumption, and amongst them several are seeking to reinvent the music listening experience as adaptive, interactive, functional and infinitely generative. These are bold objectives, having no clear roadmap for what designs, technologies and use cases, if any, will be successful. Thus each company relies on speculative product visions. Through four case studies of such companies, I consider how product visions must carefully provide a clear plan for developers and investors, whilst also remaining open to agile user-centred product development strategies, which I discuss in terms of the ‘blind search’ nature of innovation. I suggest that innovation in this area needs to be understood in terms of technological emergence, which is neither technologically determinist nor driven entirely by the visions of founders, but through a complex of interacting forces. I also consider, through these cases, how, through the accumulation of residual value, all such start-up work risks being exapted for more familiar extractive capitalist agendas under the general process that Doctorow calls “enshittification”. Lastly, I consider a number of other more specific ways in which these projects, if their growth is achieved, could influence music culture more broadly.

Balancing Act: Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement and Its Impact on Creativity in the South Korean Pop Music Industry

This paper explores the relationship between intellectual property rights enforcement and creativity in the South Korean pop music industry. Through qualitative interviews with industry professionals and an analysis of South Korea’s copyright laws, this study reveals how stringent copyright enforcement influences music production and innovation. The findings suggest that while copyright laws are essential for protecting creators’ rights, they also pose challenges for creative freedom. This paper contributes to the discourse on copyright law and creative industries, highlighting the need for policies that both protect intellectual property and encourage artistic innovation.

El disco es cultura: Sonic artifacts and Latinx Chicago

AbstractIn music production, a sonic artifact refers to sonic material that is accidental or unwanted, typically the result of the manipulation of sound. This understanding connotes both physical and figurative meanings: artifact as material alteration and as subjectively defined auditory disturbance. Both meanings attune the act of listening to noise—the perception of which relies on normative conceptions of rationality. This article takes up the sonic artifact as an aesthetic figure to listen to Latinx Chicago with attention to vinyl records (or discos) as literal material artifacts and asks: how do discos broadcast—in embodied and symbolic ways—the racialized politics of urban territory, and in turn amplify forms of spatial entitlement? Chicago's racial geography relies on the social reproduction of valuable forms of inequality that render Latinx communities displaceable, or unheard. What place‐making strategies emerge given such profound and intersecting dispossessions, and how are they amplified within the aural public sphere? El disco es cultura provides one answer. As curatorial practice, it embodies a phonoaesthetic assemblage of transcultural and transhemispheric sounds and connections that avails sonic artifacts as layered auditory experiences forged within the politics of displacement, pointing us toward the materiality of Latinx place‐making aesthetics and auditory fields of social recognition.

Семиотическое прочтение сценического костюма

The aim of the study is to identify cause-and-effect relations in semiotic interpretation of stage costume. The article explores the history of stage costume development, briefly presents its periodization with characteristic features of each stage, and socio-cultural forms of encoding. The scientific novelty of the research lies in focusing on the issue of costume semantics as an important component of the expressive system of modern music and theater productions. The research establishes that stage (theatrical) costume has its own developmental regularities and periodization caused by many factors. It is found that in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is an increasing interaction of two main trends: 1) stage costume is characterized by a high degree of codification and symbolism, with significant transformations in the specific content of symbols; 2) a variety of techniques are observed in achieving various aspects of “authenticity” in relation to theatrical action as a whole and theatrical costumes in particular.

From Musical Writings To Writing Music: Book-Writing Leading to Music School in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta

Print created the urge to innovate new modalities of musical knowledge production and dissemination in nineteenth-century Bengal. Publication of music books made the bifurcation between music theory and practice clearer, but only as a textual category. As the literature suggests, these were two categories for organizing musical knowledge, intimately entwined, where one produces the other and also doesn't exist without each other. The technology of ‘swaralipi’ (musical notation) used in the modern printed books materialized the project of disseminating music to the reader who could now ‘read’ the music from the book. For some book writers, music books were meant to be a replacement for the oral tutelage, published as ‘self-instructors’. But, on the contrary, the most prolific book-writers of the time used their books as the basis of oral tutelage in the music school. In the modern setting of the music school, the person of the ‘guru’ or ‘ustad’ was replaced by the formalized, systematic teaching of the ‘professors’ of music. Music books, as the medium of modern music pedagogy, thus changed not only the way students learned – making it possible to learn from the book with no instructor – but also the role of teachers, whose teaching was validated by the book. The music books came to function as the ‘modern shastras’ – to exercise regulatory authority over music practice, and how music is learned and taught. The ‘orality’ of music emerges as a liminal space in the gap between the writings on music and the writing of music. What emerges is an unlikely milieu where a new form of musical education is devised, the possibility of an education without a guru is conceived, and the schema of musical notation brings the entire process to life.

Beat Detection and Classification for Music Production Using RNN-LSTM Algorithm

The process of creating music involves various techniques, including beat detection and classification. This research paper proposes a novel approach to detecting and classifying beats in music production using a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory (RNN-LSTM) algorithm. The proposed method uses a set of features that are extracted from the audio signal, including spectral flux, zero- crossing rate, and energy, to train the RNN-LSTM model. The model is trained using a large dataset of music tracks and is capable of predicting the beats and their respective classifications accurately. The proposed approach was evaluated on a dataset of various music genres, and the results showed that the RNN-LSTM algorithm outperforms traditional beat detection and classification techniques. The algorithm achieved an high accuracy as compared to the traditional techniques. Additionally, the proposed method is capable of detecting and classifying beats in real-time, making it useful formusic production applications. The proposed approach has several potential applications, including music production, DJing, and music analysis. It can be used to identify the beats ina song, which can be used to synchronize different tracks, createremixes, and enhance the overall listening experience. Furthermore, the proposed method can be used to analyze the characteristics of different music genres and identify the underlying patterns that define them. Keywords— Beat Detection, Beat Classification, Music Production, RNN-LSTM algorithm, Music Analysis.

Blind extraction of guitar effects through blind system inversion and neural guitar effect modeling

Audio effects are an ubiquitous tool in music production due to the interesting ways in which they can shape the sound of music. Guitar effects, the subset of all audio effects focusing on guitar signals, are commonly used in popular music to shape the guitar sound to fit specific genres or to create more variety within musical compositions. Automatic extraction of guitar effects and their parameter settings, with the aim to copy a target guitar sound, has been previously investigated, where artificial neural networks first determine the effect class of a reference signal and subsequently the parameter settings. These approaches require a corresponding guitar effect implementation to be available. In general, for very close sound matching, additional research regarding effect implementations is necessary. In this work, we present a different approach to circumvent these issues. We propose blind extraction of guitar effects through a combination of blind system inversion and neural guitar effect modeling. That way, an immediately usable, blind copy of the target guitar effect is obtained. The proposed method is tested with the phaser, softclipping and slapback delay effect. Listening tests with eight subjects indicate excellent quality of the blind copies, i.e., little to no difference to the reference guitar effect.

Library music as a matter of time

The industry of library music (pre-existing pieces that can be licensed for use in media) has grown considerably in the past two decades with its transition to a digital medium. A rising number of composers rely on this music as a source of income, along with audiovisual creators who increasingly use it in their productions. This expansion has accentuated a fundamental aspect of library music: the creation of large quantities of tracks at breakneck speed. Parallel to this, the video editors and videographers who form library music's main client base experience tight production deadlines where the choice of music is often left as an afterthought. This article explores the implications of the sped-up creation and use of library music in the current online media landscape. Although the interactions of composers and videographers with this music are often fraught with concerns of limited time, their attitudes towards this acceleration vary considerably: for instance, composers describe their fast-paced work in widely different ways, viewing it as a constraint, or, on the contrary, as a positive and freeing aspect. That being said, the sense of urgency shared by these agents has wide-ranging impacts on every step of the ‘life’ of a library track, from its composition and presentation to its selection and synchronisation with images. As composers attempt to appeal to hurried videographers browsing libraries, these, in turn, resort to this music as an invaluable strategy to retain their audience's attention. Furthermore, sonic stereotypes that are prevalent in library music are valued as communication shortcuts in audiovisuals where messages must be conveyed through instantly recognisable musical formulas. In addition to broader impacts on the workings of library music, this widespread perception of ‘lacking time’ is also a vital factor that shapes its sonic characteristics themselves, making library music truly a matter of time.

‘I have just written a song which came out of my soul’: Lay Music Production and the Death of President John F. Kennedy

ABSTRACT The death of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 drew a mass outpouring of public and private grief. Thousands of people from all over the world sent condolence messages to his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy. They also sent pieces of music, sometimes hurriedly composed, in response to their overwhelming grief. Most of these pieces have never been heard and sit in a silent archive. This essay examines the condolence music composed for Kennedy, focusing especially on the lay material in the condolence archive, and discovers men, women, and children who found solace in the songwriting process, pre-empting what we now know to be an effective form of grief therapy. It reveals the characteristics of lay music production in response to Kennedy’s death, and how the people who sent music to Jacqueline Kennedy explained what they were doing and why they were doing it.

MUSIC PROJECT ACTIVITY: TERMINOLOGY AND CONCEPTUAL ASPECT

The author of the article offers definition of the terms «projecting», «project» and «project activity». The work highlights approaches to understanding musical project activity from the psychological, sociological, cultural, and art history point of view, from a management perspective. The evolution and possible reasons for the implementation of the project approach in the field of musical art have been considered. The definition of the concept of «music project activity» has been proposed from the standpoint of a system, personal and acmeological approach, considering in the context of the creative process of the artist, the creative environment, interaction with the audience and cooperation with other artists and specialists. The author proposes to consider musical project activity as an integrated creative activity aimed at the implementation of the specific idea, concept or task in the musical context, which includes the phases of planning, organizing and implementing various musical initiatives with the aim of creating high-quality musical products or achieving specific musical goals. Examples of art projects are given, such as: «The Rain Room», «House of Eternal Return», «Kinetic Rain» and «Cloud Gate». The impact of the project approach on the implementation of artists’ ideas and the emergence of new innovations and experiments in the world of music has been studied. The possibility of scientific research regarding the interaction of musical project activity with conducting performance and its influence on modern musical culture and art has been revealed.

The Experiences of Teachers in Teaching Computer Music in Selected Colleges and Universities in Hubei China

This study intends to determine the expectations of teachers as well as the experiences that they have had while teaching computer music composition in a selection of colleges and universities located in the province of Hubei in China. In order to gather the perception of a particular respondent in order to detect a structured pattern, this study will be based on a descriptive correlational research design. A numerical score rating will be issued to each respondent. According to Health Research Funding (2018), quantitative research enables researchers to be objective, collect data quickly, and analyze the data in a statistical format, which can provide a comprehensive perspective of the investigations being conducted. The majority of those who participated in the survey were of the opinion that students are not capable of mastering computer music production technology and need to demonstrate specific knowledge of music theory in order to develop and produce music. There was a significant amount of disagreement among educators regarding the notion that students have become more enthusiastic about participating in learning and that head teachers have already prepared multimedia courseware prior to the start of class. This courseware demonstrates the key points and difficulties involved in theoretical courses, which can directly reach the teaching purpose and optimize the organizational structure of the classroom.

Research on the Business Model and Development of NetEase Cloud Music

With the rapid development of the internet in today's world, there is a growing demand for online music streaming, accompanied by the formation of a substantial user base. According to statistical data, the majority of users belong to the 90s and 00s generations. It is precisely these younger customer segments that have transformed the characteristics of music products from a singular playback format to a more mobile and social experience. Presently, the market features prominent music streaming applications such as NetEase Cloud Music, QQ Music, and Xiami Music, each offering similar functionalities along with their unique preferences. This paper focuses on the business model, marketing strategies, and potential cross-industry offline operational models of NetEase Cloud Music, a subsidiary of NetEase. The paper employs SWOT and 4Ps analysis methods to explore the strengths, weaknesses, and growth prospects of this application as well as its marketing model. Additionally, this paper envisions a cross-industry offline development model for NetEase Cloud Music that integrates the lifestyle needs of a youthful user base and adheres to the operational dynamics of modern urbanization.

A Study on the Fair Use Principles of Artificial Intelligence Generated Music

The rapid rise of AI-generated music technologies and the associated fair use and copyright issues have become an important focus of the contemporary digital music industry. With the rapid development of AI, AI-generated music has begun to permeate music composition, performance and production. This evolution has brought new prospects as well as a series of legal and ethical dilemmas. This article embarks on an in-depth exploration into the application and enhancement of fair use regulations within the burgeoning domain of AI music generation technology. The text examines various aspects of artificial intelligence-generated music, closely scrutinizes the legal framework that supports it, and attempts to seek a balance between nurturing creativity and protecting the rights of creators and innovators.

Generating rhythm game music with jukebox.

Music has always been thought of as a "human" endeavor- when praising a piece of music, we emphasize the composer's creativity and the emotions the music invokes. Because music also heavily relies on patterns and repetition in the form of recurring melodic themes and chord progressions, artificial intelligence has increasingly been able to replicate music in a human-like fashion. This research investigated the capabilities of Jukebox, an open-source commercially available neural network, to accurately replicate two genres of music often found in rhythm games, artcore and orchestral. A Google Colab notebook provided the computational resources necessary to sample and extend a total of 16 piano arrangements of both genres. A survey containing selected samples was distributed to a local youth orchestra to gauge people's perceptions of the musicality of AI and human-generated music. Even though humans preferred human-generated music, Jukebox's slightly high rating showed that it was somewhat capable at mimicking the styles of both genres. Despite limitations of Jukebox only using raw audio and a relatively small sample size, it shows promise for the future of AI as a collaborative tool in music production.

Повышение эффективности государственной политики в сфере кинематографа с помощью машинного обучения

A study was conducted on the distribution data of a range of Russian national films from 2004 to September 2023 using machine learning methods, with successful and unsuccessful films and patriotic projects considered separately. The study utilized the ensemble machine learning model HistGradientBoostingClassifier and a sequential fully connected three-layer neural network based on the TensorFlow library, along with basic methods of natural language processing. It was found that patriotic films exhibit distribution characteristics lower than the market average and significantly lag behind successful Russian cinema projects at the box office. The study demonstrated the possibility of accurately predicting film box office receipts, distribution characteristics, as well as selecting project parameters and the composition of its creative team to enhance distribution results and increase the reach of target audiences. The study also illustrated the use of language models, specifically through film annotations, to create effective film content. A conclusion was drawn regarding the need for a set of measures to implement state policy in the field of education, information technology, culture, and art, focusing on the creation of unified media franchises and umbrella brands encompassing films, TV series, computer and online games, music, and other products. The implementation of the research results will enhance the effectiveness of public policy and the return on public and private- public investments in the creative industries sector, positioning cinema and the creative industry as self-sustaining and income-generating sectors of the economy. Leveraging rental data from other markets will facilitate the creation of content with higher demand globally, serving as a soft power and cultural influence tool. The results of the study can aid in project selection and film project development by the Russian Cinema Fund, the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, private Russian investors and film studios, as well as authorities and organizations responsible for distributing Russian film content abroad.

Vocal Dose and Vocal Demands in Contemporary Musical Theatre.

To document and quantify vocal dose and student-singers' self-assessment during rehearsals for a contemporary musical theater production. Six student singers fastened the sensor from the KayPentax APM 3200 dosimeter to the lower neck to capture neck vibration data during their preparation for the musical Wonderland by Frank Wildhorn. Data were collected during 8-hour periods, at four different stages throughout the rehearsal process: beginning (music and choreography learning phase), middle (staging phase), and end (running the entire show/dress rehearsal phase), plus a post-production day once the production had concluded to establish a baseline vocal load. Students concurrently completed the EASE questionnaire1 after each data collection day. The EASE score (Appendix1) and demographics/perceptual questionnaire (Appendix2) revealed that all subjects (three males and three females) found the singing role vocally and physically demanding but only two found the roles to be emotionally challenging. The musical score demanded a higher usage of chest register (judged perceptually) than mixed register from lead singers. All subjects' maximum fundamental frequency range exceeded the pitch range required by the score. The mean daily vibration dose (distance dose, as computed with Kay Pentax Software) of the three individual female singers' during rehearsals, 5,203 meters, was higher than the mean daily dose of the three male singers, 3,766 meters. The subjects' self-ratings on the EASE were not correlated with the distance dose. A review of Wonderland's score and perceptual judgment of the singers' performances revealed extensive use of chest register, with belting and mix vocal strategies being the predominant stylistic choices. Students described the singing roles' vocal and physical requirements as more challenging than the character's emotional components. This pilot study provides information on the vocal dose for lead and ensemble singers in rehearsal for a Contemporary Musical Theatre production. Singers and voice professionals may find dosimetry a valuable tool for monitoring the vocal dose during rehearsals and performances.