Musical Intuition Research Articles

Improvisation in the educational space of contemporary bayan and accordion art

Improvisation in the educational space of contemporary bayan and accordion art

Deep Learning-Based Music Generation

Music is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Traditionally, music composition is time-consuming and complex, requiring master sound knowledge based on music theory and musical intuition. In recent decades, deep learning have been applied in music generation, and it has experienced the process from simple sequence generation to multi-track generation considering musicality, multiple methods are implied in study to generate better music and combine existing music theory with deep learning technology, while the current technology already allow people composite easily even without domain knowledge and massive manpower. This paper offers an overview of automatic music generation task, covering majority of the currently popular deep learning-based music generation models. In addition, in latter section discusses how to unify objective criteria for music on subjective way, proposes existing deficiencies and expands possible directions. The research in this review has significant foreshadowing meaning and reference value for developing music generation in the future.

Interactive Music and Synchronous Reactive Programming

This paper presents Skini, a programming methodology and an execution environment for interactive structured music. With this system, the composer programs his scores in the HipHop.js synchronous reactive language. They are then executed, or played, in live concerts, in interaction with the audience. The system aims at helping composers to find a good balance between the determinism of the compositions and the nondeterminism of the interactions with the public. Each execution of a Skini score yields to a different but aesthetically consistent interpretation. This work raises many questions in the musical fields. How to combine composition and interaction? How to control the musical style when the audience influences what is to play next? What are the possible connections with generative music? These are important questions for the Skini system but they are out of the scope of this paper that focuses exclusively on the computer science aspects of the system. From that perspective, the main questions are how to program the scores and in which language? General purpose languages are inappropriate because their elementary constructs (i.e., variables, functions, loops, etc.) do not match the constructions needed to express music and musical constraints. We show that synchronous programming languages are a much better fit because they rely on temporal constructs that can be directly used to represent musical scores and because their malleability enables composers to experiment easily with artistic variations of their initial scores. The paper mostly focuses on scores programming. It exposes the process a composer should follow from his very first musical intuitions up to the generation of a musical artifact. The paper presents some excerpts of the programming of a classical music composition that it then precisely relates to an actual recording. Examples of techno music and jazz are also presented, with audio artifact, to demonstrate the versatility of the system. Finally, brief presentations of past live concerts are presented as an evidence of viability of the system.

Losev’s Interpretations of Richard Wagner

An enthusiasm for the work of Richard Wagner and the constant presence of the Wagnerian theme in the scholarly work of Alexei Losev were conditioned both by the philosopher’s personal taste and by the logic of historical-cultural processes. Arguing against musicology’s generally accepted viewpoint that Wagner, a reformer of opera, sought to subordinate music to drama, Losev points to Wagner’s dialectic, arguing that his drama is born from the spirit of music. He emphasizes that Wagner is primarily a musician, and that his philosophy, mythology, history, and politics represent a continuation of his musical intuitions, thereby defending the wholeness and unity of Wagner’s intellectual world. Losev considers all the contradictions within the Wagnerian artistic-mythological “universe” dialectically, contradictions that achieve a certain synthesis in the identification of their deep, shared foundations.

Writing at the Speed of Sound: Music Stenography and Recording beyond the Phonograph

Music shorthand systems devised by Michel Woldemar, Hippolyte Prévost, and August Baumgartner adapted the quill strokes of speech stenography to the seemingly analogous domain of music. Eschewing conventional staff notation in favor of cursive lines that indicated pitch, register, interval, and duration, music stenographers endeavored to record in real time instrumental improvisations and fleeting inspirations that would otherwise have been lost forever due to a lack of recording technology. To advocates of such methods, more efficient technologies of musical writing were indispensable for capturing fugitive musical thoughts and acts: music stenography aided Hector Berlioz, for example, in the composition of his Requiem. For others, including Rossini, Fétis, and contributors to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, the claims and merits of stenography were a source of controversy as well as fascination. Grounded in a corpus of seventy music stenographies that have been largely ignored by musicologists and historians of technology alike, this article asks how musical intuitions became musical texts, thereby entering print-based networks of circulation. Although the importance of “genius” and “work” as historical concepts regulating the production, ontology, and reception of nineteenth-century music has long been acknowledged, the material basis of these concepts has been overlooked until recently. The efforts of musical stenographers demonstrate that the inscription and circulation of material texts provided the means by which musical inspiration could be registered and stored, constituting a material substrate on which such idealist concepts depended. Whereas historians of sound recording have focused on seismic historical and cultural shifts wrought by the introduction of the phonograph in 1877, the preoccupation with capturing music in the decades preceding and following this date suggests an alternate conception of text-based sound recording.

Harmony on the violin - internalising harmony for violinists and the role of (tonal) improvisation

Abstract Harmony on the violin – exploring ways to enhance harmonic awareness by improvisation. How can playing with basic elements of classical music help us to enter the music we perform ‘from within’, to enjoy the creative moment in connection with the repertoire we know so well and love so much, to ‘co-compose’… How can (tonal) improvisation be an aid to learn about harmony in a way that experience comes first, using, in this research, the violin as our voice? In this research my aim has been to create a toolbox of games/exercises that can be used working in the above mentioned way. At the same time the exploratory journey of the research proved to be a transformative experience with regard to my own relationship with the music I play, love and teach. In this paper those two threads – the development of educational material and the testing out of it on the one hand and my personal development as a violinist and musician on the other hand - are constantly intertwined. The one cannot do without the other. This paper is a report of all activities that added to the above mentioned two processes. The report will guide you through the origins of the research, the rich input of colleagues, masters and books on the subject, a report of the practising, imagining, exploring hours spent by myself in my garden house, information on the enjoyable sessions when trying out the material with students. At the centre of the paper you will find the games and exercises themselves – the content of the toolbox, called ‘Invitations’. A closer look at certain aspects of the research is found in Chapter 5 – Behind the scene. The paper will finish with a set of recommendations and conclusions and – above all – future plans. I do hope you will enjoy this research – a research into methods that can be used to let the playing from musical intuition and the building of harmonic consciousness meet. In doing so, enjoying the richness, benefits and pleasure that musical improvisation has to offer in music education.

Interactive Musical Display of Quantum Dot Emission Spectra

Quantum dots (QDs) are zero-dimensional semiconductor nanostructures composed of thousands of atoms. QDs are often referred to as artificial atoms because their small structure results in unique, atom-like behavior; like atoms, QDs have optical emission at discrete wavelengths. Here the authors describe a novel method to interactively learn about the spectral properties of QDs using musical intuitions. They transform spectral information from selected Indum Arsenide (InAs) QDs into musical information, including both pitch and rhythm. Thus, they generate a multisensory experience of spectral information allowing users to learn about the range of frequencies of QDs as well as their unique spectral properties resulting from coulombic interactions.

An Information Theoretic Approach to Chord Categorization and Functional Harmony

We present new tools for categorizing chords based on corpus data, applicable to a variety of representations from Roman numerals to MIDI notes. Using methods from information theory, we propose that harmonic theories should be evaluated by at least two criteria, accuracy (how well the theory describes the musical surface) and complexity (the efficiency of the theory according to Occam’s razor). We use our methods to consider a range of approaches in music theory, including function theory, root functionality, and the figured-bass tradition. Using new corpus data as well as eleven datasets from five published works, we argue that our framework produces results consistent both with musical intuition and previous work, primarily by recovering the tonic/subdominant/dominant categorization central to traditional music theory. By showing that functional harmony can be analysed as a clustering problem, we link machine learning, information theory, corpus analysis and music theory.

Modelling the similarity of pitch collections with expectation tensors

Models of the perceived distance between pairs of pitch collections are a core component of broader models of music cognition. Numerous distance measures have been proposed, including voice-leading, psychoacoustic, and pitch and interval class distances; but, so far, there has been no attempt to bind these different measures into a single mathematical or conceptual framework or to incorporate the uncertain or probabilistic nature of pitch perception. This paper embeds pitch collections in expectation tensors and shows how metrics between such tensors can model their perceived dissimilarity. Expectation tensors indicate the expected number of tones, ordered pairs of tones, ordered triples of tones, etc., that are heard as having any given pitch, dyad of pitches, triad of pitches, etc. The pitches can be either absolute or relative (in which case the tensors are invariant with respect to transposition). Examples are given to show how the metrics accord with musical intuition.

Cognitive Dissonance and the Performer’s Inner Conflict

Much of Beethoven’s music—especially that of the late period—demands that the performer follow interpretive markings that seem to be musically counterintuitive. Conflict between the competing desires to follow musical intuition and to obey Beethoven’s performance instructions creates psychological discomfort in the performer. Social psychologists refer to this phenomenon as “cognitive dissonance.” This article will examine the ways in which the first movement of Beethoven’s Op. 101 piano sonata creates cognitive dissonance in the performer that is ultimately felt physically as well as mentally. In particular, the author revisits Robert Hatten’s reading of the movement and offers an alternate interpretation that takes into account the performer’s (as well as theorist’s) experience with the music.

Note segmentation and quantization for music information retrieval

Much research in music information retrieval has focused on query-by-humming systems, which search melodic databases using sung queries. The database retrieval aspect of such systems has received considerable attention, but query processing and the melodic representation have not been examined as carefully. Common methods for query processing are based on musical intuition and historical momentum rather than specific performance criteria; existing systems often employ rudimentary note segmentation or coarse quantization of note estimates. In this work, we examine several alternative query processing methods as well as quantized melodic representations. One common difficulty with designing query-by-humming systems is the coupling between system components. We address this issue by measuring the performance of the query processing system both in isolation and coupled with a retrieval system. We first measure the segmentation performance of several note estimators. We then compute the retrieval accuracy of an experimental query-by-humming system that uses the various note estimators along with varying degrees of pitch and duration quantization. The results show that more advanced query processing can improve both segmentation performance and retrieval performance, although the best segmentation performance does not necessarily yield the best retrieval performance. Further, coarsely quantizing the melodic representation generally degrades retrieval accuracy.

Representation and alignment of sung queries for music information retrieval

The pursuit of robust and rapid query-by-humming systems, which search melodic databases using sung queries, is a common theme in music information retrieval. The retrieval aspect of this database problem has received considerable attention, whereas the front-end processing of sung queries and the data structure to represent melodies has been based on musical intuition and historical momentum. The present work explores three time series representations for sung queries: a sequence of notes, a ‘‘smooth’’ pitch contour, and a sequence of pitch histograms. The performance of the three representations is compared using a collection of naturally sung queries. It is found that the most robust performance is achieved by the representation with highest dimension, the smooth pitch contour, but that this representation presents a formidable computational burden. For all three representations, it is necessary to align the query and target in order to achieve robust performance. The computational cost of the alignment is quadratic, hence it is necessary to keep the dimension small for rapid retrieval. Accordingly, iterative deepening is employed to achieve both robust performance and rapid retrieval. Finally, the conventional iterative framework is expanded to adapt the alignment constraints based on previous iterations, further expediting retrieval without degrading performance.

Notes from the Editor. Artur Schnabel and the ideology of interpretation

In the fall of 2001 the Akademie der Kiinste in Berlin hosted an exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the pianist Artur Schnabel (1882-1951). An excellent catalog of the exhibit was produced, with multiple essays, documents, photographs, a work list of compositions, and a bibliography.1 We can expect in the near future the publication of a catalog of Schnabel's music by Anouk Jeschke and of a volume of symposium papers that includes an inventory of the Schnabel archive. As luck would have it, when Schnabel was forced to leave Germany, he sent his papers and materials to Italy, where they remained in storage until his death. Artur Schnabel holds an atypical if not remarkable place in the history of twentieth-century performance practice. He is remembered more for his influence and approach than for his virtuosity. Both in his lifetime and posthumously, he played a decisive role in how, in the twentieth century, the performance of historic repertory, pianists, and piano playing came to be evaluated. Although trained by Theodor Leschetizky and fully capable of continuing the post-Lisztian tradition of virtuosity, Schnabel's musical intuitions and tastes led to a revolt against a superficial construct of technique and virtuosity linked to a nineteenth-century notion of decoration and the theatrical. Although disdain for an aesthetic seemingly dependent on surface virtuosity was a current in music criticism dating from Robert Schumann, the distinction between virtuosity and musical beauty lost some of its credibility as the distance between high-minded musical content and technical complexity narrowed over the course of the century. What Schumann objected to were works for the piano that were glorified pyrotechnics, near-circus acts that exploited a reductive musical rhetoric. Most of the repertory of the mid-nineteenth century that falls into that category is justly forgotten. But in the compositions of Franz Liszt and the concerto repertory of the late nineteenth century, virtuosity and compositional ambition intersected. Commanding ideas with gravitas and admirable novelty that demanded evident technical prowess became quite commonplace. Conversely, as in the example of Paganini, new standards and expectations of technique opened up compositional possibilities. In the cases of Chopin and Brahms, their demands on pianists hardly camouflaged a high degree of necessary technical control, finesse, and skill.

What is musical intuition? Tonal theory as cognitive science

Lerdahl and Jackendoff's Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) is an important contribution to cognitive science. Jackendoff claims it is a computationalist theory and that the mental representations it postulates are unconscious. Thus GTTM looks to be a kind of cognitive science remote from the folk-psychological. I argue that this picture of GTTM is mistaken: GTTM is at least as much music analysis as cognitive science. Jackendoff's metatheory fails to explain how a listener can tell that a structural description corresponds to the way she hears, how analytically minded listeners can communicate about their hearing, and how a reader of their book can comprehend it. I suggest an alternative construal, on which GTTM's analytical vocabulary functions as a public language and its mental representations are perceptual beliefs. Interesting philosophical problems ensue about knowledge of musical structure and knowledge about what structures one hears. There is a paradox: one wants an analysis to be true to a hearing, yet to be illuminating. Though analysis and hearing coincide in content at an abstract level, they do not coincide in conceptual content. What sort of knowledge then underlies the inference from perceptual to music-analytical representation? I argue that such knowledge is a priori.

Rewriting Schenker: Narrative--History--Ideology

Heinrich Schenker's system can be read as narrative purveyed in the traditional genres of drama and epic. We begin with a discussion and critique of recent music-narrative studies and then propose a historicist interpretation of Schenker's work that concentrates on its ideological agenda. Finally, we respond to his system by displacing, expanding, and rewriting segments of its conceptual framework to permit multiple readings of a musical text (specifically, a brief fivefinger exercise by Carl Czerny) and to illustrate our contention that the so-called intrinsic value of an artwork has nothing to do with its internal relationships and everything to do with the expertise of the professional interpreter. narrative to literary form, and to map that form onto music, robs narrative of its historic social function as bearer of representational and semantic values-in short, of meaning. We have suggested that Schenker's narrative of m sical structure represents a political agenda couched in traditional literary genres well-suited to his ideological motivations. And e have adduced historical circumstances th t might have prompted such an account, instead of accepting Schenker's myth of musical structures that self-generate in some epic Raum inhabited by the artist-genius. Ideology plays a crucial role in all interpretive enterprises, and its effects on Schenker's methodology have been made abundantly clear by Schenker himself; ere we have merely summarized. To loosen the bonds of absolutist Schenkerian practice, including the neo types, we have rewritten his method in a narrative better suited to its presen -day (democ atic-academic) context. Setting in motion a kaleidoscope of readings of a single piece, all based on a variety of qually valid musical intuitions, we have c ncentrated more on the interpretive act than on mining out buried musical treasure. In so doing we have tried to point up the historical contingency, ideological constraints, and arbitrariness of Schenker's story, and indeed, of all interpretive pronouncements. 5 c.t.? 5 c.t. (=8) A / 1 6 5 A ' 1 I I 5 4 I 1 , I I . I This content downloaded from 207.46.13.28 on Wed, 31 Aug 2016 05:13:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Conversation with Alvin Lucier

AM: We're about to talk for an hour or two about your music, and I'd like to begin by asking how you feel about this talking. Your music seems to me quite saliently nondiscursive music, written as though in response to centuries of narrative music. Yet here we sit and talk about it. Should we be doing this at all? AL: The idea that some musicians have, that since music stands by itself it shouldn't be talked about, is not productive for me. Our talk doesn 't stand for the music. It keeps our interest in all types of music alive; it certainly aids and has aided my own musical evolution. Each piece of mine is based on a definite idea which has attained compositional clarity for me in all sorts of ways, including conversation and verbalized thought and, of course, musical intuition.

Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion to Many Players by Vincent Wall

92 Comparative Drama vant, and the great number of criteria undercuts precision and continuity. Within the context he postulates, Godshalk’s claim that Shakespeare’s patterning is constant rather than evolutionary is hard to disprove; but he overlooks the dramatist’s growth in what might be termed overall pat­ terning, which progresses from the conspicuous symmetry of The C om edy o f E rrors, T itu s A n dron icu s, R ich ard III, and L o ve’s L abou r’s L o st to the art that conceals art in the less overt yet more dynamically functional structuring of his greater plays. Despite this shortcoming, Godshalk’s book is well worth the reading; for its pages abound with excellent examples of various formative elements in Shakespeare’s plays. DONALD K. ANDERSON, JR. U n iversity o f M issouri, C olum bia Vincent Wall. B ern ard Shaw: P ygm alion to M a n y Players. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1973. Pp. xii + 171. $8.50. This work is a useful chronicle of Shaw’s encounters with people in the theatre world. By his own admission he was “incorrigibly didactic,” and this attribute was particularly noticeable when his own plays were in preparation. He sat through the rehearsals without offering criticism, but every night he sent letters of advice to the actors and actresses which they received with their breakfast mail. These entertaining scribbles are a valuable commentary by the playwright on his own plays. His instruc­ tions were practical, incisive, often insulting, and devastatingly witty. However odious these punctilious directions must have been to the recipi­ ents, one cannot be grateful enough to the players for saving them. And although I have reservations about this book, one should also be grate­ ful to Vincent Wall for putting these letters into the context of Shaw’s career. The sketches of Shaw’s tutelage of Janet Achurch, Florence Farr, Louis Calvert, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, and Granville Barker are held together by a fast-moving account of the development of modem theatre. No exhaustive probing is required in the sections relating theatre history because Shaw’s fortunes are well known. Most of the material has been published before, in Shaw’s eight biographies, in the numerous letter col­ lections, and in such specialty studies as Bernard Dukore’s B ernard Shaw , D irector. What is new is Wall’s exploration of the reasons for saturating the players with advice. The nature of the plays demanded it, he contends, especially the unusual musical quality of a Shaw play. Some of his argu­ ments, however, do not prove an inherently musical quality in the plays, but only a speaker’s fondness for the vocabulary of music (“Now—down to pianissim o!’’). Wall’s position is stronger when he shifts from biograph­ ical anecdotes to critical analysis and (to cite one example) likens the Reviews 93 development of ideas in a particular play to “operatic structure.” It is an impressive chapter. He draws together a broad range of scholarship ef­ fortlessly. But for all the testimonials affirming the existence of musical form in the plays, it is not clear how the concept is useful. Is a play by Shaw any more “musical” than one by Yeats, Synge, or Maeterlinck? Are Pinter’s pauses rests? Sometimes one despairs that Pater ever wrote “All art constantly aspires to the condition of music.” The critical analysis of the music in Shaw’s plays is essential to Wall’s thesis: that Shaw was obsessed with instructing the actors and actresses because the musical qualities made extraordinary demands upon their skills. Every line had a precise aural shape in the mind of the playwright. The performers were drilled and harangued (in the privacy of a letter) about their phonetics, their intonation, their rhythmic pacing. But were the players truly deficient in musical intuition? Or merely unaccustomed to echoing the master’s voice? For there was a strain of tyranny in Shaw’s didacticism. Shaw’s firm position of authority in the production of his plays re­ sulted in a new conception of the director’s role. But his idea...