Musical Symbols Research Articles

A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Forest as a Musical Symbol

A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Forest as a Musical Symbol

A Covariance-matching-based Model for Musical Symbol Recognition

A musical sheet is read by optical music recognition (OMR) systems that automatically recognize and reconstruct the read data to convert them into a machine-readable format such as XML so that the music can be played. This process, however, is very challenging due to the large variety of musical styles, symbol notation, and other distortions. In this paper, we present a model for the recognition of musical symbols through the use of a mobile application, whereby a camera is used to capture the input image; therefore, additional difficulties arise due to variations of the illumination and distortions. For our proposed model, we first generate a line adjacency graph (LAG) to remove the staff lines and to perform primitive detection. After symbol segmentation using the primitive information, we use a covariance-matching method to estimate the similarity between every symbol and pre-defined templates. This method generates the three hypotheses with the highest scores for likelihood measurement. We also add a global consistency (time measurements) to verify the three hypotheses in accordance with the structure of the musical sheets; one of the three hypotheses is chosen through a final decision. The results of the experiment show that our proposed method leads to promising results.

End-to-End Neural Optical Music Recognition of Monophonic Scores

Optical Music Recognition is a field of research that investigates how to computationally decode music notation from images. Despite the efforts made so far, there are hardly any complete solutions to the problem. In this work, we study the use of neural networks that work in an end-to-end manner. This is achieved by using a neural model that combines the capabilities of convolutional neural networks, which work on the input image, and recurrent neural networks, which deal with the sequential nature of the problem. Thanks to the use of the the so-called Connectionist Temporal Classification loss function, these models can be directly trained from input images accompanied by their corresponding transcripts into music symbol sequences. We also present the Printed Music Scores dataset, containing more than 80,000 monodic single-staff real scores in common western notation, that is used to train and evaluate the neural approach. In our experiments, it is demonstrated that this formulation can be carried out successfully. Additionally, we study several considerations about the codification of the output musical sequences, the convergence and scalability of the neural models, as well as the ability of this approach to locate symbols in the input score.

Digital Symbolization of Responsibility Matrix and the Applications

The application of mathematical symbols and formulas in a certain discipline of the society always promote its development, which facilitate the mutual progress of the human beings. The common symbols used throughout the world include mathematical languages, musical symbols, English words etc. Actually, there exists another common conception in the society: responsibility which can have symbol language and logic expressions. Based on this, we carried out research and reached following conclusions: 1. The letter R (responsibility) plus eigenvalues of (-1,0, n,+1) was used to represent the high and low order (R(L,H)) of responsibility, and the basic units and total formula of responsibility were obtained. 2. The essential law behind the responsibility phenomena can be expressed using logic formulas.3. This set of responsibility symbol languages can be used in education, computer, artificial intelligence, robot etc.

Music as post-traumatic discourse: Nikolay Myaskovsky’s Sixth Symphony

This essay explores ways in which musicologists might extend work undertaken by humanities scholars in the interdisciplinary field of trauma studies that has highlighted the centrality of traumatic experience to modernist creativity. It is focussed around a case study of a musical composition that represents the emotional aftermath of a traumatic event, the Sixth Symphony of the Soviet composer Nikolay Myaskovsky (1923). A central concern is to demonstrate how the symphony’s musical symbolism is strikingly evocative of typical features of post-traumatic mentation, such as dissociation and emotional numbing, and the inhibition of the ability to mourn. It closes by considering the potential implications of the findings for understanding work by other modernist composers.

Interpretation and Improvisation: The Judge and the Musician Between Text and Context

This paper analyses the paradigms of interpretation and the evolution of the creative processes in music and law. Whether it is matter of a score or a law, the text is reborn through the work of the interpreter who, in dealing with the epistemological problem of the understanding, has to harmonize the purity of the philological reconstruction of the object with the need to actualize its sense. Moving from the creative character of every interpretation—neither the musician can be reduced to a mere executor of a concatenation of musical symbols on the staff as Stravinsky wanted nor the judge may be conceived as a bouche de la loi according to Montesquieu’s theory—this work, after having discussed Gadamer and Betti’s hermeneutical approaches to music and law, focuses on the issue of the limits to the interpreters’ freedom. The interpretation here proposed revolves around improvisation, seen as a typical cultural practice of the aesthetic dimension of music. Improvisation, which from baroque to jazz does not correspond to the realm of absolute freedom, is used as a trait d’union in order to make a comparison with legal experience. This is particularly true with the development of case law, which becomes increasingly problematic especially in the light of “liquid modernity”, where the “polytheism of values” has been gaining strength. Seen from this perspective, the comparison between the judge and the musician in their activity as interpreters of a formalized system of signs highlights the controversial relationship between form and creativity, the accuracy of the text and the requisites deriving from the social context, certainty and justice.

Sixth Symphony of Avet Terterian as a Metaphor for the Universal Requiem

The research objective is determined the peculiarities of the composition and dramaturgical organization of the Sixth Symphony of A. Terterian, taking into account the specificity of the pivotal-volume structure of the material. To solve this goal, is selected the structuralfunctional method of analysis. In the article is identified the peculiarities of the development of the symphony genre in the Armenian musical culture. The origins of the genre and the period of the flowering of the classical national symphony, which is associated with the works of composers A. Khachaturyan, A. Babadjanyan, A. Haroutyunyan, E. Mirzoyan, L. Saryan, J. Ter-Tatevosyan, K. Orbelian are named. The features of the symphonic style of A. Terterian are considered on the example of his single-movement symphonies. The main feature of Terterian's creative work is synthesized – a synthesis of the technical arsenal of linguistic innovations of the twentieth century with deep, archaic strata of domestic culture – and it is defined as an innovative idea of the composer. Dramaturgical and compositional parameters of the Sixth Symphony are analyzed. A connection was found in the concept of symphony with the semantic core of the requiem. It is determined that music does not inherit structural models of the genre and is free from church regulations, but the composer retains the semantic codes of the funeral mass. The peculiarities of the musical symbols of the spiritual genres, to which the composer appeals in the symphony, is established. Sonographics and microchromatics are defined as the main composer techniques in the construction of the compositional profile of the work. The principles of reproduction of archaic symbols of national culture through the use of the phoneme of Old-Armenian vocabulary is researched. The significance for the concept of the symphony of the use of tape recordings of orchestral voices and choral voices is analyzed.

Familiarity affects the same event-related brain potential components in note readers and non-note readers

Musical expertise can lead to neural plasticity in specific cognitive domains (e.g., in auditory music perception). However, not much is known about whether the visual perception of simple musical symbols (e.g., notes) already differs between musicians and non-musicians. This was the aim of the present study. Therefore, the Familiarity Effect (FE) – an effect which occurs quite early during visual processing and which is based on prior knowledge or expertise – was investigated. The FE describes the phenomenon that it is easier to find an unfamiliar element (e.g., a mirrored eighth note) in familiar elements (e.g., normally oriented eighth notes) than to find a familiar element in a background of unfamiliar elements. It was examined whether the strength of the FE for eighth notes differs between note readers and non-note readers. Furthermore, it was investigated at which component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) the FE occurs. Stimuli that consisted of either eighth notes or vertically mirrored eighth notes were presented to the participants (28 note readers, 19 non-note readers). A target element was embedded in half of the trials. Reaction times, sensitivity, and three ERP components (the N1, N2p, and P3) were recorded. For both the note readers and the non-note readers, strong FEs were found in the behavioral data. However, no differences in the strength of the FE between groups were found. Furthermore, for both groups, the FE was found for the same ERP components (target-absent trials – N1 latency; target-present trials – N2p latency, N2p amplitude, P3 amplitude). It is concluded that the early visual perception of eighth note symbols does not differ between note readers and non-note readers. However, future research is needed to verify this for more complex musical stimuli and for professional musicians.

A music symbols recognition method using pattern matching along with integrated projection and morphological operation techniques

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) can be divided into three main phases: (i) staff line detection and removal. The goal of this phase is to detect and to remove staff lines from sheet music images. (ii) music symbol detection and segmentation. The propose of this phase is to detect the remaining musical symbols such as single symbols and group symbols, then segment the group symbols to single or primitive symbols after removing staff lines. (iii) musical symbols recognition. In this phase, recognition of musical symbols is the main objective. The method presented in this paper, covers all three phases. One advantage of the first phase of the proposed method is that it is robust to staff lines rotation and staff lines which have curvature in sheet music images. Moreover, the staff lines are removed accurately and quickly and also fewer details of the musical symbols are omitted. The proposed method in the first phase focuses on the hand-written documents databases which have been introduced in the CVC-MUSCIMA and ICDAR 2013. It has the lowest error rate among well-known methods and outperforms the state of the art in CVC-MUSCIMA database. In ICDAR 2013, the specificity measure of this method is 99.71% which is the highest specificity among available methods. Also, in terms of accuracy, recall rate and f-measure is only slightly less than the best method. Therefor our method is comparable favorably to the existing methods. In the second phase, the symbols are divided into two categories, single and group. In the recognition phase, we use a pattern matching method to identify single symbols. For recognizing group symbols, a hierarchical method is proposed. The proposed method in the third phase has several advantages over the previous methods. It is quite robust to skewness of musical group symbols. Furthermore, it provides high accuracy in recognition of the symbols.

Recognition of Music Scores with Non-Linear Distortions in Mobile Devices

Optical music recognition (OMR), when the input music score is captured by a handheld or a mobile phone camera, suffers from severe degradation in the image quality and distortions caused by non-planar document curvature and perspective projection. Hence the binarization of the input often fails to preserve the details of the original music score, leading to a poor performance in recognition of music symbols. This paper addresses the issue of staff line detection, which is the most important step in OMR, in the presence of nonlinear distortions and describes how to cope with severe degradations in recognition of music symbols. First, a RANSAC-based detection of curved staff lines is presented and staves are segmented into sub-areas for the rectification with bi-quadratic transformation. Then, run length coding is used to recognize music symbols such as stem, note head, flag, and beam. The proposed system is implemented on smart phones, and it shows promising results with music score images captured in the mobile environment.

Об оперной режиссуре современного музыкального театра

The article is devoted to the issue of the stage director’s rendition of opera scores, as well as to the definition of the roles of the stage director, the conductor and the composer in the present-day opera theater. The author examines the historical premises for development of opera stage production and two main vectors of evolution of the process of stage production: the traditional and the innovative. The parameters which make it possible to fathom the level of transformation of the operatic source in its stage realization, namely, the temporally frameworks of the presentation of the line of the plot, correspondence to the instructions of the original libretto and the correlation of the composer’s ideas with those of the interpreting stage director. The author bases himself on the four types of manifestations of opera presentations of opera productions revealed by Evgeny Tsodokov – total authenticism, traditional realism, musical and poetical symbolism, and the innovative “stage director’s opera” – and characterizations are given defining the relation of the opera productions to each one of them. A comparative analysis is made of three production manifestations of Verdi’s pera “Rigoletto” on the topic of them pertaining to the indicated trends of the stage director’s rendition of the scores. Several fragments of productions are presented with an analysis of their production-related interpretation and, correspondingly, the relation of the productions to innovative or traditional approaches to the manifestation of the composer’s or stage director’s conceptions. The conclusion is arrived at regarding the significance of innovative production-related rendition for the contemporary opera theater. Keywords: opera stage production, interpretation of the libretto, the opera “Rigoletto,” typology of the stage director’s approaches.

Milton Babbitt’s Glosses on American Jewish Identity

Despite the fact that Babbitt claimed to “regard himself as Jewish and did not wish to be in any way evasive about being Jewish,” little scholarship has documented how Babbitt’s Jewish identity influenced his discourse or music. Yet, during the postwar era—a time when many American Jews felt an obligation to reaffirm their Jewish identity—Babbitt frequently employed Jewish themes in his discourse. Mapping the Jewish Exile narrative onto the plight of academic composers, he often draws correspondences between Schoenberg and Moses, America and the Promised Land, and the university and Masada. In this article, I contextualize this aspect of Babbitt’s rhetoric by outlining how his relationship to his Jewish identity evolved over the course of his career: from concessions he made to Princeton’s anti-Semitic policies early in his career to his active participation in conferences devoted to Jewish issues later in his career. I argue that the analogies Babbitt draws between Jewish tradition and his music demonstrate that he, like many American Jews during the period, fashioned his Jewish identity around Jewish individuals and religious beliefs that complemented his secular worldview. Then, I examine the repercussions Babbitt’s constructed Jewish identity had for his music. To this end, I offer an interpretation of three climactic, unsung moments in Glosses (1988). These three un-pitched vocalizations, I argue, not only realize the Jewish tradition wherein God, who in defying definition also resists signification, but also gloss Schoenberg’s musical symbol for YHVH.

Essays for Craig Wright

The dedicatee and honorand of Music and culture in the Middle Ages and beyond is not explicitly announced on the book’s cover. Instead, Craig Wright (Henry L. and Lucy G. Moses Professor of Music at Yale University) is revealed as the inspiration behind these studies—authored by his academic colleagues and former students—only in the introduction, which admirably sketches the changes in methodology towards the study of medieval music that have taken place over the last four decades, and to which Wright’s works have been significant witnesses. Grounded in rigorous study of primary sources—archival, musical and more recently visual and architectural—Wright’s contributions to the field have proved foundational to our understanding of musical culture in late medieval Burgundy, the career and compositional process of Guillaume Du Fay, the liturgical background to the polyphony of the Notre Dame school, and medieval musical symbolism. The editors of this book have chosen to organize the essays into three sections, each reflecting an aspect of Wright’s multifarious and cross-disciplinary approach: ‘Chant, liturgy and ritual’, ‘Archival and source studies’ and ‘Symbolism’.

Ritual roles of “African nights” DJs in Lisbon

The objective of this paper is to explore the diverse roles performed by the DJs working at the so-called “African nights” of Lisbon. Based on a three-year ethnography, the reflection starts from a dialogue with the literature on Electronic Dance Music DJs for comparing both these cultures. The social encounters at these “African” parties are analysed as a contemporary secular ritual in which participants negotiate relevant categories of social belonging and each individual´s place in a postcolonial social structure through dancing. In this context, the socialization processes on the dancefloor take place through the music chosen, produced and mixed by specialized actors: the DJs. As experts in musical symbols efficient for the ritual, they are responsible for the community across several facets. First, they choose and convoke participants in such a way that they influence the ethnic structuring of the night. Second, they guide their emotional states along the night, making them pass through a series of phases until reaching the ritual climax so that the ritual becomes efficient. Third, they facilitate the networking process among community members, acting as society builders. In conclusion, these DJs play a highly important role in the structuring of postcolonial society.

Staff-line removal with selectional auto-encoders

Staff-line removal is an important preprocessing stage as regards most Optical Music Recognition systems. The common procedures employed to carry out this task involve image processing techniques. In contrast to these traditional methods, which are based on hand-engineered transformations, the problem can also be approached from a machine learning point of view if representative examples of the task are provided. We propose doing this through the use of a new approach involving auto-encoders, which select the appropriate features of an input feature set (Selectional Auto-Encoders). Within the context of the problem at hand, the model is trained to select those pixels of a given image that belong to a musical symbol, thus removing the lines of the staves. Our results show that the proposed technique is quite competitive and significantly outperforms the other state-of-art strategies considered, particularly when dealing with grayscale input images.

HMM-based writer identification in music score documents without staff-line removal

Writer identification from musical score documents is a challenging task due to its inherent problem of overlapping of musical symbols with staff lines. Most of the existing works in the literature of writer identification in musical score documents were performed after a preprocessing stage of staff lines removal. In this paper we propose a novel writer identification framework in musical documents without removing staff lines from documents. In our approach, Hidden Markov Model has been used to model the writing style of the writers without removing staff lines. The sliding window features are extracted from musical score lines and they are used to build writer specific HMM models. Given a query musical sheet, writer specific confidence for each musical line is returned by each writer specific model using a loglikelihood score. Next, a loglikelihood score in page level is computed by weighted combination of these scores from the corresponding line images of the page. A novel Factor Analysis based feature selection technique is applied in sliding window features to reduce the noise appearing from staff lines which proves efficiency in writer identification performance.In our framework we have also proposed a novel score line detection approach in musical sheet using HMM. The experiment has been performed in CVC-MUSCIMA dataset and the results obtained that the proposed approach is efficient for score line detection and writer identification without removing staff lines. To get the idea of computation time of our method, detail analysis of execution time is also provided.

ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ ФУНКЦІЇ ЦИТАТИ В КІНОМУЗИЦІ

Мета роботи. Здійснити аналіз функцій цитати в кіномузиці в системі організації звукового рішення фільму, виявити особливості її застосування в різних фільмах та визначити способи її реалізації. Методологія дослідження передбачає застосування аудіовізуального аналізу кінофільмів, що дозволить перейти до розуміння основних функції цитати в кіномузиці. Наукова новизна дослідження в тому, що вперше сформовані основні принципи застосування музичних цитат в кінофільмі та показано їх вплив на звукове вирішення кінофільму. Висновки. Вдаючись до цитування, композитор і режисер повинні подбати про те, щоб глядач їх упізнав. Цитата привносить емоційні й смислові асоціації. В німому фільмі музична ілюстрація складена виключно з музичних цитат. Музичні цитати можуть виконувати різноманітні функції: підкреслювати трагізм сцени, використовуватись як іронічний контраст. Також цитата може бути застосована як драматичний елемент і музичний символ, може створювати пародію, характеризувати певний персонаж. Таким чином, аналіз матеріалу про цитату в фільмі дозволив автору статті сформувати систему понять про цитату в кіномузиці з обговоренням її застосування, що має суттєве значення для практики звукового вирішення кінофільму.

“Voy a empeñar la Edad de Oro”: Historia, música y política en la crisis española (2011–2016)

ABSTRACTSpain's current economic and social crisis has involved a profound reappraisal of the country's history, institutions, and official narratives, especially after the emergence of the 15M or indignados movement in 2011. A crucial example of this shift has been the widespread criticism of Spain's “Transition to Democracy” or Transición, widely considered Spain's “foundational” narrative. In this article, a series of examples from the musical field—including essays, songs, and public uses of music—are studied and contextualized in order to analyze different interpretations and critiques of the Transición developed by artists, intellectuals, and politicians who took part in the 15M or have been influenced by its “climate” (Fernández Savater). In these examples, two complementary trends are identified: on the one hand, an intention to reclaim part of the Transición's collective mood through its musical symbols; on the other, a rejection of its political legacy, as expressed in criticisms of its musical canon.

コンバリュー『音楽史』にみる共和国のシンボルとしてのベルリオーズ像：第三共和政フランスの音楽史学とカノン形成

コンバリュー『音楽史』にみる共和国のシンボルとしてのベルリオーズ像：第三共和政フランスの音楽史学とカノン形成

Online recognition of handwritten music symbols

In this paper, we propose an effective online method to recognize handwritten music symbols. Based on the fact that most music symbols can be regarded as combinations of several basic strokes, the proposed method first classifies all the strokes comprising an input symbol and then recognizes the symbol based on the results of stroke classification. For stroke classification, we propose to use three types of features, which are the size information, the histogram of directional movement angles, and the histogram of undirected movement angles. When combining classified strokes into a music symbol, we utilize their sizes and spatial relation together with their combination. The proposed method is evaluated using two datasets including HOMUS, one of the largest music symbol datasets. As a result, it achieves a significant improvements of about 10% in recognition rates compared to the state-of-the-art method for the datasets. This shows the superiority of the proposed method in online handwritten music symbol recognition.