Music System Research Articles

Universal and Non-universal Features of Musical Pitch Perception Revealed by Singing.

Musical pitch perception is argued to result from nonmusical biological constraints and thus to have similar characteristics across cultures, but its universality remains unclear. We probed pitch representations in residents of the Bolivian Amazon-the Tsimane', who live in relative isolation from Western culture-as well as US musicians and non-musicians. Participants sang back tone sequences presented in different frequency ranges. Sung responses of Amazonian and US participants approximately replicated heard intervals on a logarithmic scale, even for tones outside the singing range. Moreover, Amazonian and US reproductions both deteriorated for high-frequency tones even though they were fully audible. But whereas US participants tended to reproduce notes an integer number of octaves above or below the heard tones, Amazonians did not, ignoring the note "chroma" (C, D, etc.). Chroma matching in US participants was more pronounced in US musicians than non-musicians, was not affected by feedback, and was correlated with similarity-based measures of octave equivalence as well as the ability to match the absolute f0 of a stimulus in the singing range. The results suggest the cross-cultural presence of logarithmic scales for pitch, and biological constraints on the limits of pitch, but indicate that octave equivalence may be culturally contingent, plausibly dependent on pitch representations that develop from experience with particular musical systems. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Artistic and aesthetic ideas in “Plays” for two pianos by P. Dambis

Artistic and aesthetic ideas in “Plays” for two pianos by P. Dambis

The role of N. Ilminsky and S. Rachinsky in the formation of the personality of S. Smolensky

The role of N. Ilminsky and S. Rachinsky in the formation of the personality of S. Smolensky

Música Eletroacústica Experimental

A música realizada através de interfaces gestuais vem recebendo destaque nos últimos anos e trazendo novas possibilidades criativas para a comunidade musical. A utilização de sistemas desenvolvidos para interpretar gestos musicais através de interfaces gestuais já é uma realidade entre compositores contemporâneos. Os novos instrumentos já podem ser pensados e projetados livremente de acordo com as necessidades artísticas. Em consonância com essa realidade este texto expõe uma breve introdução ao tema e apresenta três estudos de caso sobre sistemas musicais projetados para composição e performance eletroacústica em tempo real utilizando diferentes interfaces gestuais. As metodologias usadas na criação dos sistemas e composições resultantes “Just Walking” para sistema ReactMotion, “Tempo Translúcido” para Kinect e sistema de projeção sonora multicanal e “Pendulun” para computador e Theremini são comentadas e analisadas pelos autores.

Beyond Skill Acquisition: Improvisation, Interdisciplinarity, and Enactive Music Cognition

The paradigm of enactive music cognition offers an anti-representational framework for understanding musical activity as both corporeal and culturally-situated. In this paper, I discuss live electronic musical improvisation as an exemplary model for the enactive framework in its ability to demonstrate the importance of participatory, relational, emergent, and embodied musical activities and processes. Following Gallagher, I argue that the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition, where performers develop from novices to experts who may eventually achieve a state of ‘mindless flow’, does not adequately account for what can happen during various forms of musical play. A critical study of improvisation reveals that a more generous conception of meaningful musical activity is needed, particularly in terms of who is able to take part as an improviser. I contextualise these ideas from the position of being an improviser of live electronic music performed on self-built, hybrid analogue/digital instruments, my background in creating expressive musical systems for people with profound and complex learning difficulties, and through my recent explorations of both pedagogical and research approaches to interdisciplinary improvisation.

LOOK AT ORIENTAL ENCYCLOPAEDIC SCHOLARS’ OPINIONS ON VOCAL NOTE ISSUES Abstract. This article is dedicated to theoretical views of the West scientists about specific separation of the not tempered musical system. Keywords: tone, tetrachord, scale

LOOK AT ORIENTAL ENCYCLOPAEDIC SCHOLARS’ OPINIONS ON VOCAL NOTE ISSUES Abstract. This article is dedicated to theoretical views of the West scientists about specific separation of the not tempered musical system. Keywords: tone, tetrachord, scale

Playsound.space: Improvising in the browser with semantic sound objects

This paper describes the development and evaluation of the online music making tool Playsound.space, an open platform leveraging Freesound Creative Commons audio content. After discussing the interface which relies on semantic queries and spectrogram representations, we introduce new features aiming to enhance participation and creativity support. This includes a multi-user chat system providing language translation, and a Web Audio player enabling real-time sound editing and time-stretching. We present evaluations for live performance and soundscape composition sketching. Throughout our reflections, we provide directions for future artistic and pedagogical applications that can benefit the design of other ubiquitous music systems.

Sadah: Aesthetical Quality of Talempong Sound– An Acoustical Study of Myth and Ontological Culture

The goal of this research is to discover the effect of sadah (chalk) on the aesthetical quality of talempong sound (a bronze musical instrument). In order to preserve the aesthetical quality of talempong sound, talempong elders in Minangkabau use a solution of sadah (a type of chalk commonly used in betel chewing). The sadah solution is smeared onto the inside of the talempong – the resonating chamber –to achieve a particular standard of aesthetical quality. Here, aesthetical quality refers to the musical taste measured and owned by talempong elders; this includes talempong as a music system and talempong as a musical system – both of which begin with form and sound. Form and sound are an inseparable unit, and for this reason the physical quality – form – of the talempong is significant in obtaining a talempong sound with a particular aesthetical quality. The significance of aesthetical quality is determined by the sound colour ( rono ) and duration of the reverberation or sound resonating from the talempong when struck, which talempong elders call dangiang . The method used in this research combines qualitative principles with an experimental method. The experimental method is used to discover the sound quality of the talempong before and after it has been smeared with sadah . Keywords: sadah , aesthetical quality, talempong sound, acoustic DOI: 10.7176/ADS/75-02 Publication date: August 31 st 2019

Pitch distribution, melodic contour or both? Modeling makam schema with multidimensional scaling and self-organizing maps

Experienced listeners internalize musical tonal knowledge via statistical learning of pitch distributions as a result of exposure to musical environment. Cross-cultural studies of music cognition offer new perspectives to investigate the acquisition of tonal schema. Makam music is a rich musical system characterized by modal structures defined by micro-tonal pitch sets, and melodic progression patterns (aka seyir features). Makam schema is possibly acquired by internalizing the seyir in addition to pitch features. In the current study, we examined whether an ideal model of makam schema is built with multidimensional scaling analysis and with self-organizing maps (SOMs). We were interested in whether statistical information about seyir features, in addition to pitch distributions, would form an acceptable makam schema model. We qualitatively analyzed topographical organizations in the models to understand whether they reflect complex relations between makams. Multidimensional scaling analyses did not produce an acceptable model for makam schema. The SOM trained with pitch distributions provided an adequate model for makam schema. However, the SOM trained with both pitch distributions and seyir features was better in capturing the complex relations between makams. Further behavioral research is necessary to understand whether melodic progression patterns are intrinsic features of the tonal knowledge of the experienced listeners of makam music.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Design on intelligence music system in the cultural center based on IoT

Based on the full study of the IoT technology system and the research status of the intelligent community, this paper proposes a set of music-intelligent system design scheme based on the IoT technology. In the overall design, based on the top-level design idea of centralized supervision, a set of intelligent community system including data sensing layer, network transmission layer, middleware layer, and data processing layer is designed. Under this architecture, the subsystem can be scaled horizontally, and case analysis of intelligent systems is made for each subsystem design, such as cultural museum data monitoring, wireless sensor network, and intelligent TPAD (terminal). Second, three kinds of IoT support technologies of ZigBee technology, RFID technology, and single-chip/embedded platform technology are applied to the application scenarios of intelligent systems, and combined with other technical means, such as fuzzy control, log mining, and multi-time task scheduling. The purpose of intelligent control has been achieved.

Perception of affect in unfamiliar musical chords.

This study investigates the role of extrinsic and intrinsic predictors in the perception of affect in mostly unfamiliar musical chords from the Bohlen-Pierce microtonal tuning system. Extrinsic predictors are derived, in part, from long-term statistical regularities in music; for example, the prevalence of a chord in a corpus of music that is relevant to a participant. Conversely, intrinsic predictors make no use of long-term statistical regularities in music; for example, psychoacoustic features inherent in the music, such as roughness. Two types of affect were measured for each chord: pleasantness/unpleasantness and happiness/sadness. We modelled the data with a number of novel and well-established intrinsic predictors, namely roughness, harmonicity, spectral entropy and average pitch height; and a single extrinsic predictor, 12-TET Dissimilarity, which was estimated by the chord’s smallest distance to any 12-tone equally tempered chord. Musical sophistication was modelled as a potential moderator of the above predictors. Two experiments were conducted, each using slightly different tunings of the Bohlen-Pierce musical system: a just intonation version and an equal-tempered version. It was found that, across both tunings and across both affective responses, all the tested intrinsic features and 12-TET Dissimilarity have consistent influences in the expected direction. These results contrast with much current music perception research, which tends to assume the dominance of extrinsic over intrinsic predictors. This study highlights the importance of both intrinsic characteristics of the acoustic signal itself, as well as extrinsic factors, such as 12-TET Dissimilarity, on perception of affect in music.

Statistical characteristics of tonal harmony: A corpus study of Beethoven's string quartets.

Tonal harmony is one of the central organization systems of Western music. This article characterizes the statistical foundations of tonal harmony based on the computational analysis of expert annotations in a large corpus. Using resampling methods, this study shows that 1) the rank-frequency distribution of chords resembles a power law, i.e. few chords govern a large proportion of the data; 2) chord transitions are referential and chord predictability is significantly affected by distinguished chord features; 3) tonal harmony conveys directedness in time; and 4) tonal harmony operates differently at the hierarchical levels of chords and keys. These results serve to characterize tonal harmony on empirical grounds and advance the methodological state-of-the-art in digital musicology.

O2: A Network Protocol for Music Systems

O2 is a communication protocol for music systems that extends and interoperates with the popular Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol. Many computer musicians routinely deal with problems of interconnection, unreliable message delivery, and clock synchronization. O2 solves these problems, offering named services, automatic network address discovery, clock synchronization, and a reliable message delivery option, as well as interoperability with existing OSC libraries and applications. Aside from these new features, O2 owes much of its design to OSC, making it easy to migrate existing OSC applications to O2 or for developers familiar with OSC to begin using O2. O2 addresses the problems of interprocess communication within distributed music applications.

It’s only rock ‘n roll (but I like it): Chord perception and rock’s liberal harmonic palette

Both music-theoretic accounts and corpus analyses indicate that rock routinely employs chords that deviate from the norms of common-practice music. Yet we know little about how listeners experience the chords that make up rock’s liberal harmonic palette. In the present study, participants in two online experiments rated major chords that followed a short tonal sequence (a major scale + tonic major triad). Liking ratings obtained in Experiment 1 replicated earlier work showing that listeners prefer rock-typical targets—chords that are common in rock, but lie outside the basic diatonic set—to atypical, rarely used targets (Craton, Juergens, Michalak, & Poirier, 2016). Goodness of fit ratings with the same stimuli in Experiment 2 were similar to the liking ratings. High ratings for rock-typical target chords across the two experiments were not an artifact of their register and the pattern of responses was similar across four levels level of music training. In addition, the mean fitness ratings were approximated by simulations conducted with an auditory short-term memory (ASTM) model (Leman, 2000). Considered together, the findings provide evidence that listeners perceive rock-typical chords to be normal components of a key and that they may do so based on information in the auditory signal alone, without recourse to statistical learning mechanisms or representations of tonal knowledge. We speculate that bottom-up processes operating directly on the auditory signal create a perceptual ranking of chord fitness, which provides the harmonic palette from which composers/improvisers in different musical systems may conservatively (common-practice) or liberally (rock) choose. The mean data are available in tabular form for modelers in the online supplemental material.

Risk Factors for Distortion Product Otoacoustic Emissions in Young Adults

Young adults with normal hearing may exhibit risk factors for hearing loss. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how self-reported personal music (PM) system volume use, preferred listening level, and self-reported alcohol use affects distortion product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs). Two-hundred, sixteen young adults, 161 women and 55 men, participated. Questionnaire data included the PM system and alcohol use. DPOAEs were obtained from 1–6 kHz and collapsed into 1/3rd octave bands and a probe microphone was used to determine preferred listening level. Alcohol was defined as drinks per month (DPM), categorized as No, Light (≤14), and Heavy (>14). Men who reported loud/very loud volume use had statistically significant lower DPOAEs at 1.5, 2, and 3 kHz than men who reported lower volume use. Light and Heavy DPM men had lower DPOAEs at 1.5, 2, and 3 kHz than no DPM men, but this was not statistically significant. There were no DPOAE differences for either variable in women and there was no association between preferred listening level and DPOAEs for women or men. Men who reported loud/very loud volume use and any DPM had poorer mid-frequency DPOAEs. There was not an association for volume use or DPM and DPOAEs in women.

Research on the theory and practice of multimedia music image photography in music research

Note recognition is the core and key of music score recognition. In this paper, according to the diversity and polymorphism of notes, a structure-based recognition scheme is determined, and its recognition process is divided into two stages: primitive extraction and structure analysis. In the aspect of note primitive extraction, the rough extraction method based on vertical run-length coding and the fine detection method based on horizontal run-length coding are proposed, which overcome the shortcomings of the existing methods such as poor adaptability of complex notes and incomplete extraction results. A solid head extraction method is designed, which first divides and then detects the features. This method uses the prior knowledge of notes and the existing spectral lines and trunk recognition. In the aspect of note structure analysis, a new method of note structure analysis based on action field is proposed. In this method, the concept of action field in physics is introduced into the relationship expression of note primitives, and the unity of knowledge, generality and accuracy is realized. On this basis, six note substructures are defined, and a note structure analysis model of key structure priority location is established, which realizes the reconstruction of the note base metadata to the note object. This model reflects the thinking habit of highlighting key features and from the whole to the details in manual spectrum recognition. It not only reduces the complexity of analysis, but also has a strong ability of primitive redundancy error removal. The test results show that the overall recognition performance has reached the level of the current excellent commercial music score recognition system, and it has obvious advantages in note recognition, adaptability in different data environments and execution speed.

Order, context and popularity bias in next-song recommendations

The availability of increasingly larger multimedia collections has fostered extensive research in recommender systems. Instead of capturing general user preferences, the task of next-item recommendation focuses on revealing specific session preferences encoded in the most recent user interactions. This study focuses on the music domain, particularly on the task of music playlist continuation, a paradigmatic case of next-item recommendation. While the accuracy achieved in next-song recommendations is important, in this work we shift our focus toward a deeper understanding of fundamental playlist characteristics, namely the song order, the song context and the song popularity, and their relation to the recommendation of playlist continuations. We also propose an approach to assess the quality of the recommendations that mitigates known problems of off-line experiments for music recommender systems. Our results indicate that knowing a longer song context has a positive impact on next-song recommendations. We find that the long-tailed nature of the playlist datasets makes simple and highly expressive playlist models appear to perform comparably, but further analysis reveals the advantage of using highly expressive models. Finally, our experiments suggest that the song order is not crucial to accurately predict next-song recommendations.

Feature-combination hybrid recommender systems for automated music playlist continuation

Music recommender systems have become a key technology to support the interaction of users with the increasingly larger music catalogs of on-line music streaming services, on-line music shops, and personal devices. An important task in music recommender systems is the automated continuation of music playlists, that enables the recommendation of music streams adapting to given (possibly short) listening sessions. Previous works have shown that applying collaborative filtering to collections of curated music playlists reveals underlying playlist-song co-occurrence patterns that are useful to predict playlist continuations. However, most music collections exhibit a pronounced long-tailed distribution. The majority of songs occur only in few playlists and, as a consequence, they are poorly represented by collaborative filtering. We introduce two feature-combination hybrid recommender systems that extend collaborative filtering by integrating the collaborative information encoded in curated music playlists with any type of song feature vector representation. We conduct off-line experiments to assess the performance of the proposed systems to recover withheld playlist continuations, and we compare them to competitive pure and hybrid collaborative filtering baselines. The results of the experiments indicate that the introduced feature-combination hybrid recommender systems can more accurately predict fitting playlist continuations as a result of their improved representation of songs occurring in few playlists.

Yuebu of the Tang Dynasty: Musical Transmission from the Han to the Early Tang Dynasty

This paper studies the system and development of the yuebu, an official court music system during the Tang dynasty. Research on the music of the Tang dynasty has been quite abundant, mostly on the yanyue (court banquet music that was administered by the yuebu), with notable studies by scholars such as Ren Bantang (1982), Kishibe Shigeo (1973), Wang Xiaodun (1995), and Shen Dong (2000). However, previous research on music of the Tang dynasty emphasised acculturation and assimilation between China and cultures from bordering western countries; they did not look at music of the Tang court from the perspective of the yuebu as a complex bureaucratic system. Our interest focuses on yuebu as a functioning system that reflected a historically important route of transmission of traditional Chinese music. Through examining the cultural integration of several dynasties encompassing a period lasting more than three hundred years from the Han to the early Tang dynasties, as well as migration and training of the musicians of the yuebu and their method of musical transmission (particularly transmission within the family unit), this paper aims to gain an insight into the historical basis and cultural meaning of the yuebu. The discussion consists of two parts. Part one introduces the classification and the nature of the yuebu. On the one hand, as an official musical organisation in the court, the music repertory of the yuebu was the result of combinations of a variety of musical cultures from the Han to the Tang dynasties. On the other hand, as a bureaucratic organisation, yuebu represented a system consisting of “yue (music), qi (instruments), gong (musicians), and yi (uniform)”, legally sanctioned under the “yuelin (law on music)”. Part two concerns itself with the development of the yuebu in the Tang dynasty through scrutinizing the impact of migration and the training of musicians, and musical transmission during the pre-Tang era (namely, the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern, and Sui dynasties). From this, the paper ventures to explore, with a musicological approach, the typical means of propagating music traditions in China via training and transmission within a relatively closed system that was self-protecting and maintained within the family unit.

Interaction Topologies in Mobile-Based Situated Networked Music Systems

In this paper, we present a complete framework, both technical and conceptual, aimed at developing and analysing Networked Music Systems. After a short description of our technical framework called soundworks, a JavaScript library especially designed for collective music interaction using web browser of mobile phones, we introduce a new conceptual framework, we named interaction topologies, that aims at providing a generic tool for the description of interaction in such systems. Our proposition differs from the theoretical approaches generally proposed in the literature by decoupling the description of interaction topologies from the low level technical implementation of the network. We then report on a set of scenarios and prototypes, illustrating and assessing our framework, which were successfully deployed in several public installations and performances. We particularly show that our concept of interaction topologies succeeds at describing and analysing global aspects of interaction from multiple point of views (e.g., social, human-computer) by allowing for composing simple abstract figures. We finally introduce a discussion on agencies and perception of users engaged in such systems that could later complete our framework to conceive and analyse Networked Music Systems.