Musical Entities Research Articles

Words and Music: Considering the Musicianship of Lyric Writing

Abstract: Popular songs are ubiquitous in the lives of school-age children, but the construction of traditional school music curricula does not always provide an adequate framework for studying them. In particular, the salience of words qua lyrics is an inescapable feature of popular songs, and recognizing the musical properties of those lyrics opens for study an important dimension of the real-world music that students of all ages engage so readily. Rather than treating song lyrics as separate from the music, I here attempt to establish that lyrics can be treated as musical entities, as demonstrated in scholarship from popular music theorists and musicologists that highlights the musical properties of song lyrics and the musicianship of those who write them. Then, I argue that existing school curricula could do more to give lyrics their musical due, which would not only enhance the teaching and learning of popular songwriting itself, but also may expand notions of what counts as music more broadly, with benefits for school music curricula overall, perhaps especially in the domains of choral and general music.

Words and Music: Considering the Musicianship of Lyric Writing

Abstract: Popular songs are ubiquitous in the lives of school-age children, but the construction of traditional school music curricula does not always provide an adequate framework for studying them. In particular, the salience of words qua lyrics is an inescapable feature of popular songs, and recognizing the musical properties of those lyrics opens for study an important dimension of the real-world music that students of all ages engage so readily. Rather than treating song lyrics as separate from the music, I here attempt to establish that lyrics can be treated as musical entities, as demonstrated in scholarship from popular music theorists and musicologists that highlights the musical properties of song lyrics and the musicianship of those who write them. Then, I argue that existing school curricula could do more to give lyrics their musical due, which would not only enhance the teaching and learning of popular songwriting itself, but also may expand notions of what counts as music more broadly, with benefits for school music curricula overall, perhaps especially in the domains of choral and general music.

From Albums to Musicking Assemblages: Virtual Structures and Topological Unfoldings in Toyomu’s “Imagining” of Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo

In 2016, Kanye West released his highly anticipated eight album, The Life of Pablo, on a streaming platform Deezer, where it remained exclusively available for over a month. This prevented audiences from several countries, where the service has not yet launched, from accessing it. As a result, Japanese electronic music producer, Toyomu, created his own version of the album, without hearing the original. Browsing the internet, he tracked every sample and every lyric that West used, and assembled them into an original work, comprising an “imagining” of how The Life of Pablo could have sounded. His endeavor, while ingrained in the cultural logic of remix, goes beyond it, comprising a unique musical entity that eludes easy categorization. Therefore, the paper employs Manuel DeLanda’s assemblage theory to account for its specificity. This entails a shift from a relational and processual understanding of the musical album, already implied in West’s work, to mapping the topological structure of possibilities, defined by invariants and attractors, that hints at real but not actual vectors of its becoming. As such, Toyomu’s undertaking provides an opportunity to further rethink the concept of the musical album in a time when it was already decentered by the transition from material objects to digital data.

Relation Extraction Based on BERT and BGRU in the Chinese Music Scene

Due to the lack of music knowledge extraction tools and public datasets, there are relatively few studies on music entity relation extraction. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) model considers contextual information and provides more dynamic, richer vector representations of generated words. Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units (BGRU) has longdistance learning capability, which can obtain rich contextual semantic feature. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep learning model based on BERT and BGRU combined with an attention mechanism for Chinese music relation extraction. Experimental results show that the proposed method obtains good results when extracting the relation between musical entities.

How musicality changes moral consideration: People judge musical entities as more wrong to harm

A growing literature shows that music increases prosocial behavior. Why does this occur? We propose a novel hypothesis, informed by moral psychology: evidence of others’ musicality may promote prosociality by leading us to judge musical individuals as having enhanced moral standing. This effect may be largely indirect, by increasing perceptions of how intelligent and emotionally sensitive musical individuals are. If so, simply knowing about others’ musicality should affect moral evaluations, such as wrongness to harm. Across four experiments (total N = 550), we found supportive evidence. Information that an animal or person had the capacity and motivation to engage with music led participants to judge these entities as more wrong to harm than matched neutral or non-musical counterparts. Similarly, knowing that a person was not musical made people judge them as less wrong to harm than neutral or musical counterparts. As predicted, musicality was positively associated with perceptions of capacities for emotionality and intelligence, and these broader factors partially mediated the relationship between musicality and wrongness to harm. These effects were not influenced by participants’ own musicality. Thus, non-moral attributes like musicality can impact moral consideration, carrying implications for social behavior and for interventions to promote prosociality.

Этноджаз в контексте фольклорной культуры: проблемные аспекты гибридизации

The article presents an analysis of ethnojazz as a hybrid phenomenon that combines folk melodies and the jazz style. The appeal of jazz towards the culture of folk music has significantly enriched its expressive language and themes. At the same time, ethnojazz has performed the function of preserving and popularizing folklore materials. It has been demonstrated that the hybridization of folklore and jazz is an organic process because of their cultural-genetic and procedural-effective relationship, among other things, in the aspects of live, real action. At the same time, in the context of jazz arrangement of folklore materials, there arises the problem of adequate perception of the true ethno-cultural meanings of such hybrid texts. Due to a certain reduction in the geographic area of existence of authentic folk music, such a problem exists even for the bearers of their ethnic tradition. For an audience that perceives a musical text which makes use of melodies pertaining to foreign cultures, adequate understanding becomes even more problematic. The solution to the problem is perceived in the formation of an attitude of a purposeful perception of ethno-jazz music as a cultural musical entity which contains sensually rich figurative-musical presentations of values, meanings and significations inherent in certain ethnic cultures. It is proved that the acquisition of such competence makes the cultural identity of a contemporary human being more multifaceted, meaningful and dynamic.

Harmonic Chains

Omega Quintet (Idea Factory International, 2014), a role-playing video game released for the Sony PlayStation 4, centers around the concept of weaponizing musical entities and apparatuses to combat threats in a dystopian universe. Omega Quintet weaponizes music literally, supernaturally, and economically, both inside and outside of the game narrative. In this article, we interpret these types of weaponization as an extended allegory for consumption. On one level, the surface narrative denotes sound as a murder tool, on another level the player enables violent consumption of these tools, and yet another level reveals the weaponization of agency within a gendered labor market. The story of Omega Quintet is set in a dystopian Japan overrun by monsters known as the BEEP. Protagonist Takt and his childhood friend, Otoha, join an organization that develops special idols known as Verse Maidens to fight the BEEP. Surviving members of humanity provide the fan base for the Verse Maidens. The Verse Maidens depend on fan support to fuel their powers. Battles in Omega Quintet feature an assortment of musical weaponization. Examples include Sound Weapons as the main conduit for physical attacks, Verse Maidens’ unique songs to play during extended attack sequences known as Live Mode, and special joint attacks known as Harmonic Chains. The battles take the commodification of idols to such an extreme that they are simultaneously consumed and used as weapons. Presented as a duality of fragility and strength, beauty and brutality, art and war, the Verse Maidens are consumed in a complex system of cultural and narrative implications.

Creativity in Generative Musical Networks: Evidence From Two Case Studies.

Deep learning, one of the fastest-growing branches of artificial intelligence, has become one of the most relevant research and development areas of the last years, especially since 2012, when a neural network surpassed the most advanced image classification techniques of the time. This spectacular development has not been alien to the world of the arts, as recent advances in generative networks have made possible the artificial creation of high-quality content such as images, movies or music. We believe that these novel generative models propose a great challenge to our current understanding of computational creativity. If a robot can now create music that an expert cannot distinguish from music composed by a human, or create novel musical entities that were not known at training time, or exhibit conceptual leaps, does it mean that the machine is then creative? We believe that the emergence of these generative models clearly signals that much more research needs to be done in this area. We would like to contribute to this debate with two case studies of our own: TimbreNet, a variational auto-encoder network trained to generate audio-based musical chords, and StyleGAN Pianorolls, a generative adversarial network capable of creating short musical excerpts, despite the fact that it was trained with images and not musical data. We discuss and assess these generative models in terms of their creativity and we show that they are in practice capable of learning musical concepts that are not obvious based on the training data, and we hypothesize that these deep models, based on our current understanding of creativity in robots and machines, can be considered, in fact, creative.

Profil “Kontemporer” Musik Kelahiran Minang


 
 
 one of musical entities in West Sumatera is the Minangkabau cultural music. The existence of the music has changed significantly since the second half of twentieth century, as an intergral change of Indonesian music in general. Following the situation I see the emergence of academic discussions on the music in a member of forums in this republic. In the discussion, many terms are adopted from foreign languages, especially English, such as “contemporary”. Various meanings given to “contemporary” are used to define the phenomena of changes in music in the countri. One of a newly-created music as a phenomenon of change in the Minangkabau cultural context is “Kawin Silang” composition. The composition in this article is discussed in the contemporary perspective. 
 
 

Transformation of Krinok to Bungo Krinok Music: The Innovation Certainty and Digital-Virtual Contribution for Cultural Advancement

Innovation is a certainty for the development of folk music. The use of digital technology is part of the creation of folk music in the sense of evolution itself. Krinok music is one of Jambi’s traditional music themes. This music genre is a cultural wealth that has great potential for artistic development and advancement. Musical systems, melodic contours, musical grammar, and interval patterns make up the distinctive character of krinok music. The normative freedom of the singing text’s spontaneous expression in presenting this musical entity and its changes is the entity that colors this uniqueness. The contribution of digital technology in processing krinok music has the potential for reproduction and publication as an integral part of the creative process itself. The placement of krinok music as cultural property is an effort to process it creatively. The result was the birth of new music as a transformation of Jambi folk music called “bungo krinok” music. This creative activity is an effort to progress the Indonesian nation’s culture.

Transpozicija mita o Panovoj fruli u Satirovoj svirali Petra Konjovića - fantazijski i baladni punktovi

In this paper we interpret the elements of the fantasy and ballad principle in Satirova svirala [La flûte de Pan] (1945) for solo flute written by Petar Konjović (1883-1970) from the point of view of the author's poetics and musical and non-musical analogies with Claude Debussy's (1862-1918) composition Syrinx (1913). Aspects of the fantasy principle are equally manifested when considering Satirova svirala as a unique musical entity that musicalizes the myth of Pan's flute, as well as in the context of its dramaturgical position, as being the central movement (Andante più sostenuto e molto rubato) in the five-movement Concert Suite for Wind Quintet. The variation principle, ballad-like 'narrativity' of the flute part, improvisational character, and rubato spaces of the Svirala's musical flow emanate the Other logic and "free play" inseparable from fantasy, resonating, at the same time, with the mythical narrative.

Ballard, Lully, and the Books that Helped Change How We Think about Music

In 1678, Parisian music printer Christophe Ballard departed from traditional practice by publishing Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédies en musique in full score. Score presents all vocal and/or instrumental parts in a single visual space, enabling users to form mental images of works, something impossible with the layout previously favored for ensemble music, part books, which distributed parts among different visual spaces. Other printers followed Ballard in publishing scores, thereby facilitating Music Criticism dealing in detail with specific pieces and passages. By providing access to music by means other than performance, score reified musical entities, encouraging the concept of musical works.

Recognizing Musical Entities in User-generated Content

Recognizing Musical Entities is important for Music Information Retrieval (MIR) since it canimprove the performance of several tasks such as music recommendation, genre classification or artist similarity. However, most entity recognition systems in the music domain have concentrated on formal texts (e.g. artists’ biographies, encyclopedic articles, etc.), ignoring rich and noisy user-generated content. In this work, we present a novel method to recognize musicalentities in Twitter content generated by users following a classical music radio channel. Our approach takes advantage of both formal radio schedule and users’ tweets to improve entity recognition. We instantiate several machine learning algorithms to perform entity recognition combining task-specific and corpus-based features. We also show how to improve recognition results by jointly considering formal and user-generated content.

Topology of Networks in Generalized Musical Spaces

The abstraction of musical structures as mathematical objects in a geometrical space is one of the major accomplishments of contemporary music theory. The author generalizes the concept of musical spaces as networks and derives compositional design principles via network topology analysis. This approach provides a framework for analysis and quantification of similarity of musical objects and structures and suggests a way to relate such measures to human perception of different musical entities. Finally, network analysis provides alternative ways of interpreting the compositional process by quantifying emergent behaviors with well-established statistical mechanics. Interpreting the latter as probabilistic randomness in the network, the author develops novel compositional design frameworks.

A Study on the Musical entity of the ‘Deotbaegi' rhythm

A Study on the Musical entity of the ‘Deotbaegi' rhythm

Music as Ruled by Primary Processes: Condensation

Of all the arts, music is the closest to primary processes and the archaic modes of mental functioning. Consequently, condensation as one of the basic primary process mechanisms plays an important role in music. It manifests as the condensation of different musical entities (themes, scales etc.), of different principles of organization, and also as an underlying logic of those analytic strategies that postulate the existence of structural layers, where events at deeper levels condense several more superficial events (e. g. Schenkerian analysis).

Online music recommendation platforms as representations of ontologies of musical taste

Abstract The framework of the ‘social ontology of the internet’ is applied to music recommendation platforms. Those websites provide individual suggestions of music to users, creating new dynamics of taste that are no longer based on human-to-human interaction and verbalized judgments. An exemplary analysis of three platforms shows that different conceptions of musical tastes are represented by technical systems: situational emotional preferences, a formalist aesthetics, and social proximity based on tastes. The platforms share certain assumptions about the ontology of musical entities and of course the constitutive act of recommending. We discuss how this act can be ascribed to technical systems. Theses on the platforms’ effects on the social structure of musical tastes are developed.

Anomia for musical entities

ABSTRACTBackground: Previous work has investigated extensively the neuroanatomical correlates of lexical retrieval of words for concrete entities. Musical entities, such as musical instruments, are often included in studies of category-specific naming deficits but have rarely been the focus of such work.Aims: This article reviews a program of research investigating the neuroanatomical basis for lexical retrieval of words for unique (i.e., melodies) and nonunique (i.e., musical instruments) musical entities.Main Contribution: We begin by reporting findings on the retrieval of words for unique musical entities, including musical melodies. We then consider work focusing on retrieval of words for nonunique musical entities, specifically musical instruments. We highlight similarities between the two lines of work and then report results from new analyses including direct comparisons between the two. These comparisons suggest that impairments in naming musical melodies and in naming musical instruments are both associated with damage to the left temporal pole (LTP). However, musical instrument naming appears to rely on a more distributed set of brain regions, possibly including those relating to sensorimotor interactions with such instruments, whereas melody naming relies more exclusively on the LTP.Conclusions: Retrieval of names for musical melodies appears to rely on similar neuroanatomical correlates as for other proper nouns, namely the LTP. Musical instrument naming seems to rely on a broader network of regions, including the LTP and sensorimotor areas. Overall, melody naming seems to coincide with naming of other proper nouns, while musical instrument naming appears distinct from other categories of nonunique items.

MERA

In this paper, the authors describe Musical Entities Reconciliation Architecture (MERA), an architecture designed to link music-related databases adapting the reconciliation techniques to each particular case. MERA includes mechanisms to manage third party sources to improve the results and it makes use of semantic technologies, storing and organizing the information in RDF graphs. They have implemented a prototype of their approach and have used it to link sources with different levels of data quality. The prototype has been effective in more than 94% of the cases under the conditions of their experiments. The authors have also compared their prototype with a well-known music-specialized search engine, outperforming the search results in the two experiments that they performed.

Divine fusion: Sufi music with a rock ‘n’ roll soul in Hindi cinema’s Rockstar

Abstract Sufi music is a devotional genre of traditional music in South Asia, known for its syncretic blend of literary traditions and musical genres, while rock music, an import from the West, began on the margins of Indian popular music. Early Hindi film, notorious for incorporating popular and traditional musical genres into its pictures, featured both traditional Sufi music (e.g. qawwali) and early rock ‘n’ roll in frequent appearances as ‘item numbers’. Picturizations of Muslims relied on exoticized on-screen representations, while rock bands were often picturized doing spastic dance moves, and plagiarizing hits from bands such as the Beatles. Beginning in the 1990s, however, a new genre of Sufi music diverged from its traditional roots and acquired rock and pop attributes, resulting in a powerful musical entity that allowed the emergence of a new genre of Hindi film song, as well as an independent popular genre of Sufi pop-rock. This article examines how the Sufi song became associated with the sentiments of rock music, despite its devotional nature, and the extent to which Sufi pop-rock influenced and helped establish the rock genre in the soundtrack of films such as Rockstar (Ali, 2011) It looks at the different types of Sufi song, its transformation to a new form of Sufi pop-rock, and how it inspired rock in Hindi film creating a musical prototype that helped normalize and advance rock music as an acceptable musical outlet for a new Zeitgeist.