Musical Structure Research Articles

The Embodiment of Postmodernism in Ryuichi Sakamoto's Rap Track Undercooled

Since the postmodernism has spread around the world and the advent of electronic music, more and more composers based on traditional music concepts are fusing modern technology to explore sound and acoustics, using the combination of acoustic instruments and electronic music. Ryuichi Sakamoto is one of the most representative composers of contemporary electronic music influenced by postmodernism. This article will take Ryuichi Sakamoto 's work Undercooled, composed in 2004 from album Chasm, as an example to analyze The musical structure, melody design, lyrics will be the focus of the analysis. Secondly, through the analysis of the postmodernism concept displayed in this piece, the author tries to clarify the postmodernism concept is reflected in the music piece.

Investigating a Vocal Improvisatory Genre (Mawwāl) in Arab Music: a Case Study of a Mawwāl Performance by Wadī‘ al‐Ṣāfī

ABSTRACTAlthough recent decades have witnessed a significant growth and expansion of studies dealing with the performing practice of Arab music improvisation, most such studies are focused on instrumental, not vocal, performing practices. As a result, Arab vocal performing practice, especially that of vocal improvisatory genres, still lacks a comprehensive theoretical approach. In this article I examine the maqām (Arab modal framework) phenomenon by analysing a piece in its pre‐eminent improvisatory genre (mawwāl) composed and performed by an eminent musician: mawwāl ‘Ṭal al‐Ṣabāḥ’ by Wadī‘ al‐Ṣāfī. Most vocal improvisation is presented in Arab music literature without a defined or definite melodic (or rhythmic) structure. I posit that the mawwāl genre has defined and quasi‐defined structures on the macro and micro levels of the piece, since a major part of those structures is manifested as recurring, defined compositional devices and interrelationships throughout the piece within the improvisational frame of the mawwāl genre, a reflection of its structural intricacy. This article thus contributes to the existing literature on classical Arab vocal performance by implementing the theory of natural schemata as an analytical framework along with a structural analysis based on a detailed descriptive transcription of the piece, and thus characterising the largest and smallest strata of musical structures in the mawwāl genre.

기악곡의 감상 교육에서 서사의 활용 - 베토벤의 “운명” 교향곡을 중심으로 -

Instrumental music is not easy to deal with the appreciation education because the musical content is highly abstract. Moreover, since the phrase "appreciate music" is often used in schools, there is a tendency to immediately encounter difficult instrumental music as objects of appreciation rather than objects of listening. This study highlights the terminological relation between appreciation and listening and suggests that teachers make use of narrative materials which enable to show the musical structure of the piece. As exemplified in Beethoven's "Fate" Symphony, the value of the work can be appreciated by examining the entire flow of the piece. In order to lead listeners to musical imagnation, there are already some narrative materials in visual forms for this piece, but pictures tend to hinder students from chasing musical expression. Therefore, the researcher instantiates how to develop narrative materials in wording. This approach enhances cohesiveness of listening to music and contributes to conducting comprehensive appreciation of understanding, enjoying, and evaluating.

ANALYSIS ON THE STRUCTURE OF TRADITIONAL DANCE MAENGKET

This research aims to explore the musical structure of Maengket Art, a performing arts tradition in Kaweng village, Kakas sub-district, Minahasa district. Maengket art is typically performed in harvest ceremonies as a form of expression of gratitude and joy towards God for the harvest obtained by the local community. Maengket art performances generally involve many dancers and involve both male and female dancers dancing in pairs. Maengket art is divided into three main parts, namely Maowey Kamberu, Marambak, and Lalayaan. The choice of the title of this research was based on the researcher's interest in the musical structure of Maengket Art songs, especially those that take place in Kaweng village, Kakas sub-district. The research method used is descriptive qualitative with data collection techniques through observation, interviews and documentation. The validity of the data is checked carefully, then the data is analyzed through reduction, presentation and verification processes. The results of the research show that in Kaweng village, Kakas subdistrict, Minahasa district, there is a Maengket Art group which has been established since 1968. This Maengket Art adopts Toulour literature as an integral part of their performances. Chapters of Maengket Art in Kaweng village, such as Maowey Kamberu, Marambak, and Lalayaan, depict various aspects of local community life. Maowey Kamberu expressed his gratitude for the abundant harvest, Marambak highlighted the spirit of mutual cooperation in the housewarming ceremony, while Lalayaan described the interactions between Minahasan youth in looking for a soul mate or social relationships in the past.

Using music and music‐based analysis to model and to classify terrain in geomorphology

AbstractMusic has long served as a bridge between science and nature, allowing for the artistic expression of natural and human‐made phenomena. While music has been used in geomorphology as an engaging teaching strategy, its application in specific scientific inquiries within geomorphology remains relatively unexplored. Drawing on the morphological similarities between music and terrain relief, this work introduced a novel music‐based method for modelling and expressing terrain relief based on the drainage basin profile (DBP). It converts terrain relief into pitches and time values according to mapping rules and then describes terrain relief in an audible form. Based on 5 sample areas and 360 drainage basins on the Loess Plateau, we developed the application of the proposed method on four core geomorphic tasks, including landform interpretation, analysis, recognition and classification. Experimental results show that (1) terrain music can interpret the terrain relief and landform evolution processes through its musical structure and rhythmic variations; (2) music derivatives are related to different terrain features, such as terrain relief, terrain variation intensity, landform evolution degree and terrain complexity, and have a well‐functioning relationship with a series of conventional terrain derivatives; (3) leveraging machine learning techniques, the terrain music method is effective for landform recognition, achieving an overall accuracy of 88.85% and a mean accuracy of 88.85%; and (4) via a case study in Northern Shaanxi, music modelling successfully divided it into 12 distinct landform regions and 8 landform types. Different landform regions exhibit clear regional boundaries and gradual transition zones, while specific landform regions share prominent terrain, spatial clustering and landform processes. Our delineation provides reasonable and effective landform differentiation but captures additional bed‐rock mountain features compared with a traditional method. This study highlights that music is not only an artistic expression but also a valuable research paradigm for a wide range of geomorphic tasks, offering fresh perspectives and enhancing our understanding of loess landforms. The results show a promising effort to integrate music theory into practical geomorphic tasks, demonstrating the potential of using music as a medium for conveying and analysing spatial information in geomorphology.

Hierarchical multi-head attention LSTM for polyphonic symbolic melody generation

Creating symbolic melodies with machine learning is challenging because it requires an understanding of musical structure and the handling of inter-dependencies and long-term dependencies. Learning the relationship between events that occur far apart in time in music poses a considerable challenge for machine learning models. Another notable feature of music is that notes must account for several inter-dependencies, including melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic aspects. Baseline methods, such as RNNs, LSTMs, and GRUs, often struggle to capture these dependencies, resulting in the generation of musically incoherent or repetitive melodies. As such, in this study, a hierarchical multi-head attention LSTM model is proposed for creating polyphonic symbolic melodies. This enables our model to generate more complex and expressive melodies than previous methods, while still being musically coherent. The model allows learning of long-term dependencies at different levels of abstraction, while retaining the ability to form inter-dependencies. The study has been conducted on two major symbolic music datasets, MAESTRO and Classical-Music MIDI, which feature musical content encoded on MIDI. The artistic nature of music poses a challenge to evaluating the generated content and qualitative analysis are often not enough. Thus, human listening tests are conducted to strengthen the evaluation. Qualitative analysis conducted on the generated melodies shows significantly improved loss scores on MSE over baseline methods, and is able to generate melodies that were both musically coherent and expressive. The listening tests conducted using Likert-scale support the qualitative results and provide better statistical scores over baseline methods.

Classical Turkish Music Composition with LSTM Self-Attention

Synthetic symbolic music generation, the process of creating new musical pieces using symbolic representations, has gained significant traction in the field of music informatics and computational creativity. It holds immense potential for various applications, ranging from music education and composition assistance to music therapy and personalized music recommendation systems. Classical Turkish music (CTM) exhibit distinct characteristics regarding Western Tonal Classical Music (WCM) such as melodic organization, formation of rhythmic structure or melodic expressions. This study tackles the challenge of symbolic music composition, focusing on CTM. Unlike WCM, CTM incorporates microtonal intervals. These intervals are smaller than the semitones in Western music, allowing for a more nuanced expression of pitch. This leads to a more diverse set of pitch ranges. The proposed method employs a combination of self-attention and long-short term memory (LSTM) networks to capture long-term relational information and generate realistic CTM compositions. LSTMs effectively model sequential dependencies and improve local relations within musical structures and self-attention improves the context vector, allowing the model to attend to different aspects of the musical context simultaneously. This combination enables the proposed method to generate compositions that are both musically coherent and stylistically consistent with distinct features of CTM. The proposed method was evaluated on two datasets, the CTM dataset and Classical Music Piano (CPM) dataset. The assessment of musical contents is evaluated through melodic similarity and stylistic consistency metrics. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is able to generate musical content that is coherent and produce music that is pleasing-to-hear. Overall, the article presents a novel and effective approach to symbolic music composition, focusing on CTM.

Aesthetic Considerations on György Ligeti’s Works

This article represents a revised chapter of my book György Ligeti’s Creation in the Stylistic Context of the 20st Century, published in 1999. It shows the divergent and contrasting aspects of the com poser’s pieces, their synaesthesis and their preference for allusions and illusions. Ligeti’s whole work is a large spectrum built with associable musical structures that are also found with other composers or even in extramusical artistic productions. But despite this, it remains original and innovative, not belonging to any stylistic orientation of 20th century music.

Musical Structure and the Interpretability of Agamemnon 1513–20

Abstract: This article situates the amoebaeon Agamemnon 1407–1576 within the musical structure of the play. Employing a criterion of interpretability in performance, it demonstrates how even the most complex choral and musical passages remain interpretable when a play is experienced linearly in performance. The amoebaeon, as preserved, is not interpretable however: the repetition of the second ephymnion (lines 1513–20) is intrusive, and it prevents the audience from appreciating Aeschylus’s musical structure. Further, lines 1513–20 do not conform to Aeschylus’s use of refrains elsewhere. Interpretability is restored if this passage is deleted.

The Interconnections of Music Structure, Harmony, Melody, Rhythm, and Predictivity

Repetition and structure have a significant place in music theory, but the structure hierarchy and its influences are often ignored in both music analysis and music generation. In this article, we first describe novel algorithms based on repetition to extract music structure hierarchy from a MIDI data set of popular music and show its effectiveness through evaluation. Then, we introduce new data-driven approaches to estimate and validate structural influences in music. Results show that the automatically detected hierarchical repetition structures reveal significant interactions between structure and harmony, melody, rhythm, and predictivity. Different levels of hierarchy interact differently, providing evidence that structural hierarchy plays an important role in our popular music data set beyond simple notions of repetition or similarity. We further study how musical structure has evolved over decades of popular music writing. Finally, we discuss the importance of this work in highlighting roles that structure can play in music analysis, music similarity, music generation, music evaluation, and other music information retrieval tasks.

Exploring “Galant Style” in 18th-Century German, French, and Italian Composers’ Pieces

This paper explores the Galant style of music, which emerged in the mid-18th century as a bridge between the Baroque and Classical periods. The characteristics of this style are simplicity and elegance, and it focuses on melody and harmony over complex counterpoint. Most people would classify the Galant style as Rococo, and this paper proves this opinion is wrong. Compared to the Galant style, the Rococo style is associated with visual arts. Comprehensive research of the Galant style illustrates that this style prioritizes clarity and musical structure rather than ornamental and decorative features. In order to demonstrate the Galant style, this paper chose pieces from three renowned composers, Domenico Scarlatti, Francois Couperin, and Georg Philipp Telemann, representing different nationalities; those composers come from Italy, France, and Germany. These pieces, including Scarlatti's piano sonatas (K.29 and K.145), “Le Bavolet Flottant” by Francois Couperin, and Telemann's Fantasia TWV33 no.8 in G minor, above of these pieces illustrate the distinct characteristics and nuances of the Galant style.

Evaluación del aprendizaje de las matemáticas en un taller de composición musical aplicando las herramientas del enfoque Ontosemiótico

Abstract The mathematical music composition workshop, an endeavor that integrates mathematics and music majors, is a concrete example of a STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) project. In this article, the authors analyze how mathematics students and music composition students have worked together, have learned to interpret specialized languages from one another, and have presented their results to a public interested in the relationship that guards these two disciplines. The goal of improving the understanding of abstract mathematical concepts through the application to musical structures is analyzed using the Onto-semiotic Approach (OSA). This framework sheds light on some of the written and oral manifestations of the students who participated. The mathematical competence that the participants were expected to achieve through this interdisciplinary endeavor are privileged in this article over the music education goals (which were also present).

Multidimensional Scale Analysis and Modeling of Emotional Space in Yao Music

Abstract The research content of this paper gives a detailed analysis of the system structure of the music emotion recognition system. In the process of music feature extraction and recognition, the system first reads the note queue and tempo information queue of the format music and then analyzes and calculates the basic features of the music, tonal and melodic features, etc., respectively. The content of the text set is projected into a three-dimensional visual space using the multidimensional scale analysis method, and then the emotional theme is obtained by dividing the class groups. The samples from the Yao music database are selected as the data source for music emotion research, and performance analysis is performed. The results prove that the method of this paper can effectively perform feature extraction on Yao music files, with an average misdetection rate of only 0.09% and a recognition rate of more than 83% in all cases. The musical structure of Yao Village Impression can be broken down into five parts. The musical melodies mostly consist of major second and minor third intervals. The emotional labeling of structures 1 and 4 in the cluster analysis is distributed in four quadrants, with a preference for pleasurable emotions. Structure 2 was more concentrated in quadrants 1, 4. These emotion distribution results are consistent with the music depicting the beauty of Yao village and the emotional life of Yao people.

Marcos estruturais como balizadores da prática pianística: um estudo com estudantes de graduação

Research in musical practice points out that structural awareness of the piece to be learned is a strategic element for performance improvement. Nonetheless, the relationship between practice and musical structure in piano students’ learning has been little explored. The present article aimed to examine the segmentation of practice sessions of two undergraduate piano students in light of the musical structure of D. Scarlatti’s Sonata K. 271. In a longitudi-nal perspective, data from the first month of practice were mapped, described, and analyzed based on practice segmentation and content of semistructured interviews as well as markings on the score. Starts and stops of practice segments were interpreted considering musicologi-cal analytical principles. The results showed that the impact of the piece’s structure on prac-tice differed for each participant and that the acquisition of fluency seemed determinant for the higher incidence of stops on structural points.

Elaborating Advanced Machine Learning Techniques in the Music Class

In music education, there are several cases where the instructor needs to set preparatory tasks and use verbal communication, both of which, nonetheless, interrupt the music continuity. These “interruptions” are considered as learning barriers. Having researched teaching communication habits on several music instruction cases, we have come up with the idea of designing a set of software blocks that, laid down together as a digital aid to the class, can generously assist music teaching by providing communication facilitators in a wide range of commonly used music teaching exercise tasks. In this direction, a range of algorithms and software blocks have been implemented at the Ionian University using the Max/MSPTM dedicated software platform, comprising the FIG set of tools. A specific subset of these software tools has included Machine Learning (ML) logic in order to promote a wiser instructor-student communication that advances class musicality and potentially facilitates deeper consolidation of musical structures.

MIAO TIANRUI — A LEGEND OF CHINESE MUSIC PEDAGOGY

The article is devoted to the musical and pedagogical heritage of Miao Tianrui, a universally recognised founder of the basic theory of music education in China. The article represents the achievements of Master Miao in the field of musical lexicography, highlights his musical and pedagogical activities, identifies the main line of scientific research — the problems of musical structure and temperament, demonstrates the achievements in the methodological field, covering the creation of exclusive educational materials and adaptation of the Western European experience through the translation of iconic musicological research.

Composer's video for his own work: time parallels, dotted lines, perpendiculars

Relevance of the study is related to the problem of composers' self-illustrations in the YouTube presentations. The novelty of this topic is conditioned by new practice to illustrate music in YouTube. Graphic representation of music leads to the problem of correspondence between music and video. We selected only two Ukrainian composers to compare: Yuri Ishchenko and Sviatoslav Luniov.
 The main objective of the study is the determination of main principles of similarity or dissimilarity of time structures in music and images. The methodology is based on methods of comparison and analogy in the context of phenomenological approach to the Event in the Being Time (by late Heidegger). How the study was done: time structures of selected compositions were compared, through analogies, with the illustrating graphic events as phenomena of existential time. Thereby a number of similarities and dissimilarities were detected.
 Composer Y. Ishchenko preferred to illustrate his music by static images. Such a situation is a paradoxical because of the dynamic essence of his music. It establishes the problem of co-existent two time situations: in the first of them there is an integral and quasi-timeless image of music; but in the other situation there is a running stream of music structures. This approach becomes very and very fruitful because Music is able to use both the continuity, integrity of musical image as well as fluid sound events. The Y. Ishchenko's "Watercolors" for violin and piano are illustrated by several images; this approach makes it possible to mark different parts of total design (i.e. different movements or stages). Another solution one can hear and see in his "Small partita" for violin and harp. I helped him to accompany this design with fragments of animation about baroque époque. There are several GIFs - the periodically repeating images, which creates a cross-rhythm constellation with music. The significant crossfade is present in the video by Ishchenko's 3rd Violin sonata: ruined house through cross-like gap transforms in an abandoned church. The final fade of it lasts a minute. Thus, the minimal graphic processes are extremely expressive. S. Luniov mastered advanced skills in electronic music and its visual presentation. In his video "POST” he combines fragments of his own Panta Rhei for orchestra with sounds of the war. The intensity of the music development is essentially higher than that of graphic illustration, but at the end of the project the situation is opposite. In the video accompanying his Panta Rhei for orchestra S. Luniov synchronized main events and stages of the sound score with more intensive changes of the video stream and its thematic.
 Findings and conclusions. For the composer Y. Ishchenko, the graphic self-illustration on YouTube was mostly the outer necessity. He often limited his projects with static images for the total score or its main parts. Thus, he reinforced the integrity pole of events with the graphic ingredient of YouTube projects. Thereby, the dramaturgic tense of his compositions is concentrated in music. Such an approach was called time perpendicular strategy or time dotted line strategy. For the composer S. Luniov, the graphic self-illustration on YouTube is mostly the parallel stream of events. However, the tempo and intensity of visual and sound streams can be unequal. Such an approach is called time parallel strategy. Significance of the study follows from its conclusions, leading to more skillful and exact solutions within composers' self-illustration, i.e. in clarifying the semantic and structure design in music.

Cognitive and sensory expectations independently shape musical expectancy and pleasure.

Expectation is crucial for our enjoyment of music, yet the underlying generative mechanisms remain unclear. While sensory models derive predictions based on local acoustic information in the auditory signal, cognitive models assume abstract knowledge of music structure acquired over the long term. To evaluate these two contrasting mechanisms, we compared simulations from four computational models of musical expectancy against subjective expectancy and pleasantness ratings of over 1000 chords sampled from 739 US Billboard pop songs. Bayesian model comparison revealed that listeners' expectancy and pleasantness ratings were predicted by the independent, non-overlapping, contributions of cognitive and sensory expectations. Furthermore, cognitive expectations explained over twice the variance in listeners' perceived surprise compared to sensory expectations, suggesting a larger relative importance of long-term representations of music structure over short-term sensory-acoustic information in musical expectancy. Our results thus emphasize the distinct, albeit complementary, roles of cognitive and sensory expectations in shaping musical pleasure, and suggest that this expectancy-driven mechanism depends on musical information represented at different levels of abstraction along the neural hierarchy. This article is part of the theme issue 'Art, aesthetics and predictive processing: theoretical and empirical perspectives'.

Virtual Computer Systems in AI-Powered Music Analysis: A Comparative Study for Genre Classification and Musicological Investigations

The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and music analysis in recent years has altered how humans perceive and analyze music. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of virtual computer systems for AI-powered music analysis, as well as how they affect musicological insights and genre classification. The goal of the project was to uncover hidden patterns inside musical compositions while improving our understanding of genre features and underlying musical structures by fusing cutting-edge AI algorithms with the possibilities of virtualization technology. A quantitative study design with controlled experiments using standardized music datasets was used. Musical compositions of various styles were chosen, and relevant musical features such as melody, rhythm, and harmony were retrieved. Metrics for performance evaluation included genre categorization accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, as well as efficacy indicators for musicological investigations. The findings of the study shed light on the innovative possibilities of AI-driven music analysis. Across a range of musical genres, accurate genre classification was achieved, demonstrating the accuracy of AI models in identifying subtle genre traits. Deeper knowledge of musical works was aided by the discovery of complex melodic motifs, chord progressions, and rhythmic patterns through musicological research. By highlighting the synergies between AI techniques and virtual computer systems, this study contributes to the expanding landscape of AI-powered music analysis. It demonstrates AI's potential for automating hard activities, complementing musicological investigations, and providing insights that supplement human expertise. The study demonstrated the potential of AI-powered music analysis, but it also highlighted its shortcomings due to biases in training data, model overfitting, and resource restrictions in virtual systems. These limitations highlight the necessity of constant improvement and awareness when incorporating AI into musicology.

New harmony of Javanese keroncong case study: Boogie Rahayu's work on the Kroncwrong album Sono Seni Ensemble

This research aims to unveil one of the compositional works of the Sono Seni Ensemble Surakarta music group, titled 'Boogie Rahayu.' This work offers a distinct paradigm and compositional technique in comparison to the works of typical progressive keroncong orchestra groups. The study endeavors to reveal the composition of 'Boogie Rahayu' through an analysis that integrates source knowledge of karawitan music structures, keroncong playing techniques, attitudes towards sound sources, and an openness to presenting new harmonies. Examining this compositional work contributes to addressing the issue of creativity stagnation in the Javanese style of keroncong. The research adopts a musicological and cultural approach, focusing on the primary objects of the work and the performers. Data collection techniques involve field observations and interviews conducted through both online and offline methods, as well as document and artifact studies using conventional and online methods. During the analysis stage, this study employs an emic approach, considering the composer's thoughts and beliefs, alongside a musicological approach that delves into musical structure, rhythm changes, cadence interpretation, and chord harmony. The results of the research indicate that 'Boogie Rahayu' introduces a new avenue of development capable of transcending artistic and aesthetic boundaries among keroncong music, Javanese style, and Javanese karawitan