Piano Roll Research Articles

Notation as material culture

One of the warmest April days on record greeted the start of the interdisciplinary conference ‘Material cultures of music notation’, held from 20 to 22 April 2018 at Utrecht University. The historical importance of the Academiegebouw (where the Union of Utrecht was signed in 1579, unifying several of the northern provinces of the Netherlands), as well as its convenient location on Dom Square in the heart of the city made it an ideal setting for the conference. Funded through a Veni postdoctoral grant by the NWO (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research), ‘Material cultures of music notation’ aimed to approach the notation of music—in the broadest sense—‘not just as a vessel of music-theoretical knowledge, but as an object of social interaction and cultural exchange’ (see http://notationcultures.com). The wide-reaching theme attracted interest from musicologists from numerous subdisciplines as well as scholars from other fields from all over the world. Forty-four papers were presented in two parallel sessions, most of which were mixed sessions with varied content and research perspectives, covering topics ranging from piano rolls and the role of notation in improvisation to notation in South Indian music and modern digital techniques. The subdiscipline of early music was well represented, with almost a quarter of all papers dealing with medieval or early modern topics.

Rewiring the DMCA’s history: 20th-century new media and the expanding imaginary for infringement

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a refinement of governmental techniques developed for technologies such as piano rolls, reprography, DAT, and VCRs. The technological history recontextualizes legal transitions in copyrights during the 20th century and builds on poststructuralist work on law, technology, and government. Building on Kittler’s understanding of symbolic/technical media and storage/processing, I develop a framework for disentangling the relationship among copyright, DRM, and media technologies. The case studies indicate ICTs are vectors for extending copyright into previously unimagined territories. I argue cultural practices become problematized as they are remediated in new technologies. The evidence suggests the shift from governing storage to processing corresponds to broader rearrangements in power, binding our rituals and means of perception ever more tightly to articulations of industry and state.

El derecho de autor, las nuevas tecnologías y el derecho comparado. Una reflexión para la legislación nacional y sus desarrollos jurisprudenciales

Copyright law was created as a result of the printing press invention. Development and evolution of this area of law is deeply connected to technology advancement. As a result, major changes in the law have come with inventions like photography, piano roll, vinyl records, as well as magnetic tape for recording audio and video. In relation to digital technology, Internet, and proper enforcement of copyrights, the Mexican legal system seems to be outdated. Therefore, several amendments are needed. This article is comparative study of copyright law and technology developments. This comparative study, is based on judgments of courts of several jurisdictions solving issues related to new technology and copyrights, from peer to peer technology, to interactive Internet sites known as Web 2.0, in which users upload protected works with or without authorization. The comparative perspective may prove helpful in future developments of Mexican Copyright Law.

Lithuanian Piano Rolls: Collections and Research

Lithuanian piano rolls are part of a large and still-neglected field in the U.S.: the musical heritage to be found on ethnic piano rolls. During the last ten years, the author discovered and researched several hundred Lithuanian piano rolls in order to determine their significance. These rolls are held mainly in U.S. Lithuanian archives, with additional examples located in several academic libraries. All Lithuanian rolls were issued in a relatively short time, from 1916 to 1931 by various companies, specifically U.S. Word Rolls, Connorized Music Company, Vocalstyle Song Roll, and especially Q-R-S. Lithuanian folk music (songs, dances) predominate, but this medium also includes numerous unique examples of Lithuanian art music composed by Lithuanian composers in the U.S.: Jonas Žemaitis, Vincentas Nickus, Antanas Vanagaitis, and Augustas Antpusaitis. Unfortunately, Lithuanian piano rolls in Lithuania itself are almost unknown, because of a lack of instruments to play them (player pianos) and the high price of the rolls. Only a few instruments and rolls were shipped before WWII from America to Lithuania, and only one roll has remained in a state museum during all the years since, having survived the Soviet Era. Consequently, these rolls were unknown to Lithuanian librarians and researchers up to 2006, when several collections of rolls were discovered in American archives.

MoshViz: A Detail+Overview Approach to Visualize Music Elements

A music piece contains a large amount of information represented as a series of instructions corresponding to notes that must be played at specific times. These simple notes are combined to form complex harmonic structures that can be difficult to identify and analyze. Due to its simplicity and straightforward interpretation, music sheets and piano rolls have been the visual metaphor employed by most music visualization tools to support interpretation. Albeit it can represent all necessary elements to perform a music piece, these metaphors do not explicitly show many of the patterns and structures inherent to music arrangements, such as rhythm progression and harmonic interactions, needing users to create a mental model of them. Moreover, comparing different pieces and visualizing how a particular instrument track relates to the others is an issue not only for music sheet-based techniques, but also for most existing music visualization methods. In this paper, we present a novel visualization framework, called Music Overview, Stability, and Harmony Visualization (MoshViz), which facilitates the visualization and understanding of music renditions, focusing mainly on the visual analysis of specific musical instruments. Our approach creates a high-level model of music data and highlights structures of interest, enabling a detail+overview visualization to assist users in the task of identifying harmonic and melodic patterns. The usefulness and representativeness of MoshViz are confirmed by a set of user tests which demonstrate that the proposed visual metaphor matches, with a high degree of accuracy, the mental model of different users regarding the recognizable patterns of sounds.

End-to-end music transcription using a neural network

We present various neural network models that learn to produce music transcriptions directly from audio signals. Instead of employing commonplace processing steps, such as frequency transform front-ends or temporal smoothing, we show that a properly trained neural network can learn such steps on its own while being trained to perform note detection. We demonstrate two models that use raw audio waveforms as input and produce either a probabilistic piano roll output or text in music notation format that can be directly rendered into a score.

Controlling Rhythm in the Frequency Domain

This article describes a way to approach music sequencing, with particular focus on the generation of dynamic rhythm patterns. In contrast to the well known “step sequencer” or “piano roll” style interfaces that specify note pitches and amplitudes as values located at points in time, the device described here calculates note patterns from the sum of a series of discrete sinusoids. When these patterns trigger velocity sensitive percussion sounds, useful rhythms can be generated and transformed with very few controls.

HMM 기반 TTS와 MusicXML을 이용한 노래음 합성

노래음 합성이란 주어진 가사와 악보를 이용하여 컴퓨터에서 노래음을 생성하는 것이다. 텍스트/음성 변환기에 널리 사용된 HMM 기반 음성합성기는 최근 노래음 합성에도 적용되고 있다. 그러나 기존의 구현방법에는 대용량의 노래음 데이터베이스 수집과 학습이 필요하여 구현에 어려움이 있다. 또한 기존의 상용 노래음 합성시스템은 피아노 롤 방식의 악보 표현방식을 사용하고 있어 일반인에게는 익숙하지 않으므로 읽기 쉬운 표준 악보형식의 사용자 인터페이스를 지원하여 노래 학습의 편의성을 향상시킬 필요가 있다. 이 문제를 해결하기 위하여 본 논문에서는 기존 낭독형 음성합성기의 HMM 모델을 이용하고 노래음에 적합한 피치값과 지속시간 제어방법을 적용하여 HMM 모델 파라미터 값을 변화시킴으로서 노래음을 생성하는 방법을 제안한다. 그리고 음표와 가사를 입력하기 위한 MusicXML 기반의 악보편집기를 전단으로, HMM 기반의 텍스트/음성 변환 합성기를 합성기 후단으로서 사용하여 노래음 합성시스템을 구현하는 방법을 제안한다. 본 논문에서 제안하는 방법을 이용하여 합성된 노래음을 평가하였으며 평가결과 활용 가능성을 확인하였다. Singing voice synthesis is the generation of a song using a computer given its lyrics and musical notes. Hidden Markov models (HMM) have been proved to be the models of choice for text to speech synthesis. HMMs have also been used for singing voice synthesis research, however, a huge database is needed for the training of HMMs for singing voice synthesis. And commercially available singing voice synthesis systems which use the piano roll music notation, needs to adopt the easy to read standard music notation which make it suitable for singing learning applications. To overcome this problem, we use a speech database for training context dependent HMMs, to be used for singing voice synthesis. Pitch and duration control methods have been devised to modify the parameters of the HMMs trained on speech, to be used as the synthesis units for the singing voice. This work describes a singing voice synthesis system which uses a MusicXML based music score editor as the front-end interface for entry of the notes and lyrics to be synthesized and a hidden Markov model based text to speech synthesis system as the back-end synthesizer. A perceptual test shows the feasibility of our proposed system.

Using music[al] knowledge to represent expressions of emotions

ObjectiveBeing able to identify expressions of emotion is crucial to effective clinical communication research. However, traditional linguistic coding systems often cannot represent emotions that are expressed nonlexically or phonologically (i.e., not through words themselves but through vocal pitch, speed/rhythm/tempo, and volume). MethodsUsing audio recording of a palliative care consultation in the natural hospital setting, two experienced music scholars employed Western musical notation, as well as the graphic realization of a digital audio program (Piano roll visualization), to visually represent the sonic features of conversation where a patient has an emotional “choke” moment. ResultsWestern musical notation showed the ways that changes in pitch and rate correspond to the patient’s emotion: rising sharply in intensity before slowly fading away. Piano roll visualization is a helpful supplement. ConclusionsUsing musical notation to illustrate palliative care conversations in the hospital setting can render visible for analysis several aspects of emotional expression that researchers otherwise experience as intuitive or subjective. Various forms and formats of musical notation techniques and sonic visualization technologies should be considered as fruitful and complementary alternatives to traditional coding tools in clinical communications research. Practice implicationsMusical notation offers opportunity for both researchers and learners to “see” how communication evolves in clinical encounters, particularly where the lexical and phonological features of interpersonal communication are concordant and discordant with one another.

Duke Ellington as Pianist: A Study of Styles by Matthew J. Cooper, and: Why Jazz Happened by Marc Myers (review)

as Pianist: A Study of Styles. By Matthew J. Cooper. (Monographs and Bibliographies in American Music, no. 24.) Missoula, MT: College Music Society, 2013. [xvi, 127p. ISBN 9781881913610 (paperback), $45.] Music examples, appendices, bibliography, index. Why Jazz Happened. By Marc Myers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. [x, 267 p. ISBN 9780520268784 (hardcover); ISBN 9780520953987 (e-book), $34.95.] Bibliographic references, index. (1899-1974) is known to many Americans as the leader of a swing-era dance band as well as a writer of pop tunes. Some musicians and jazz fans also know him as a major composer--arranger. In fact, there are musicologists and journalists who consider to be America's greatest composer, which puts him in a league with Charles Ives and Aaron Copland. Though many jazz fans think of as a pianist too, few scholars have examined how unique and original his approach to the keyboard really was. Dr. Matthew J. Cooper of Eastern Oregon University wrote that Ellington surely stands as one of the great jazz pianists, and his work is worthy of greater recognition than it has been accorded in the past (p. 102). Responding to this need, he wrote as Pianist. A Study of Styles. It is a very welcome contribution because it not only touts the importance of the pianist, but it also explicates the unique techniques that made him original. This book may prove to be essential study for jazz pianists and jazz theory teachers, not just fans. Cooper is wonderfully conversant with a wide variety of commentaries that prove pivotal to our understanding of Ellington's piano styles. service that the author provides by doing this is commendable, particularly because he shares useful excerpts from writings that may be unknown to scholars and fans. For instance, observations by pianist Dick Katz, pianist-historian Mark Tucker, and composer-historian Gunther Schuller are particularly informative. Quotes from written remarks by himself are penetrating. Cooper is such a tenacious researcher that he even tracked down several strands of counter-evidence for an arcane discussion about whether ever made a piano roll. To help us understand the meat of Ellington's piano style, the author has undertaken the huge task of transcribing and analyzing solos from sources that range all the way from 1928 to 1972. For instance, he selected the obscure 1929 recording Lazy Duke to extract the pianist's work in accompanying a clarinet solo; used parallel triads in f cross rhythm. To refute the contention of some critics that not particularly good as a pianist, Cooper provides transcriptions of the 1932 recording Lots o' Fingers (at 288 beats per minute). Then, for chapter 5: The Later Years and the Atypical Style, Cooper takes quite seriously the odd matching of with avant-garde bassist Charles Mingus and bebop drummer Max Roach that led to the puzzling music on their Money Jungle album of 1962. (Coincidentally, the contemporary drummer-bandleader Terri Lyne Carrington is now using some of this strange music for her group's repertory.) Though we have long known that admired the work of James P. Johnson, the father of stride piano, we may not have known many specifics. We learn from Cooper that Part of Johnson's influence on the younger his exciting use of rhythmic displacement. Johnson never confined himself to a monotonous pattern of 'oom-pah' bass notes and chords; instead, he found graceful and imaginative ways to vary the left-hand accompaniment. In doing so, he created a range of surprising accents and regulated the rise and fall of tension masterfully within each of his phrases (p. 24). Among the historically-significant contributions that made as a pianist, the author alerts us to the fact that was among the first pianists to embrace the technique now known as 'comping. …

The Editing and Arrangement of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Disklavier and Synthesizers

Over the last three decades a number of approaches have been used to hear Conlon Nancarrow’sStudies for Player Pianoin new settings. The musical information necessary to do this can be obtained from his published scores, the punching scores that reveal the planning behind the compositions, copies of the rolls, or the punched rolls themselves. The most direct method of extending theStudiesis to convert them to digital format, because of the similarities between the way notes are represented on a player piano roll and in MIDI. The process of editing and arranging Nancarrow’sStudiesin the MIDI environment is explained, including how piano roll dynamics are converted into MIDI velocities, and other decisions that must be made in order to perform them in a particular environment: the Yamaha Disklavier with its accompanying GM sound module. While Nancarrow approved of multi-timbral synthesis, separating the voices of his Studies and assigning them unique timbres changes the listener’s experience of the “resultant,” Tenney’s term for the fusion of multiple voices into a single polyphonic texture.

Note‐based alignment using score‐driven non‐negative matrix factorisation for audio recordings

This study presents a discussion on the task of score alignment, which properly aligns an audio recording with its corresponding score. Conventional methods have difficulty performing this task because of asynchrony in the recording of simultaneous notes in the score. A note-based score alignment based on the pitch-by-time feature is proposed, called the piano-roll feature, and it presents an approach for converting the audio spectrogram to a piano-roll-like feature. Score-driven non-negative matrix factorisation is then adopted in the transformation. Furthermore, this study also proposes pitch-wise alignment considering each pitch sequence (i.e. the row of piano roll) separately. Results based on the MIDI-Aligned Piano Sounds database show that approximately 88% of notes match their onsets, deviating from the ground truth by less than 50 ms. Other results based on SCREAM Music Annotation Project database that is a manual annotation project of commercial CD recordings are presented as well.

Towards an Embodied Understanding of Performing Practices. A Gestural Analysis of Debussy’s “Minstrels” According to the 1912 Piano Rolls

Claude Debussy’s performance of “Minstrels” from Preludes, Book I, in the 1912 piano rolls contains expressive techniques that are not often heard today: random pushes and pulls of tempi, flippant rhythmic alterations, frequent inégale, and tempo rubato. These performing practices, although odd-sounding to the modern listener, were common at the turn of the twentieth century. His vivid rendition of the piece, including these expressive techniques that are missing from the notation, significantly alters the experience of the music. Unexpected meanings that cannot be deduced from studying the score alone arise when taking into consideration Debussy’s interpretation as a performer. This article gives an integrative analysis that regards the score and Debussy’s performance as equally important in a structural analysis. The concept of gesture is useful here, as it can be construed in both a score-based and a performative or physical approach. Moreover, in “Minstrels,” an extra dimension of physical gesture exists in its allusion to the blackface minstrel show. In the analysis, active, bodily-based concepts drawn from the blackface minstrel show are used to describe gestures and their transformations. From a Merleau-Pontyian perspective, the analysis thus treats gesture as at once musical and physical, moving away from a traditional, cognitive-based approach. The analysis shows the emergence of two large-scale structural processes—that of disorientation and that of upward reaching. These two processes culminate in the expressif section but are undercut by a dominating gesture of incoherence. A closer historical reading of the ridiculed, male “black” body in the context of blackface minstrelsy reveals that the emergent gesture-based structure of the piece can afford socio-historical meanings. The convergence between the study of historical performing practices and embodied gestural analysis yields fresh, important insights into the structure, inner workings and cultural significances of Debussy’s music.

Off the record: performing practices in Romantic piano playing

Off the Record: Performing Practices in Romantic Piano Playing. By Neal Peres Da Costa. NY: Oxford University Press, 2012. 342pp. (hardcover). Figures and Musical Examples, Index, Companion Website. ISBN 978-0-19-538691-2. $45 The recently published book, Off the Record, by Neal Peres Da Costa is a very welcome and important addition to our understanding of how pianists of an earlier generation performed nineteenth century romantic piano repertoire. The author, who is associate professor and chair of early music at the Sydney Conservatory of Music, has expanded upon his 2002 PhD dissertation (University of Leeds) and has drawn upon a wealth of piano rolls and early recordings in investigating the freedom of expression and individuality exhibited by many pianists of the so-called Golden Age. Oxford University Press has provided a website for the book containing innumerable recorded extracts from recordings discussed in the text, as well as additional musical examples that were either too large to include in the book or merely an appendix to the author's discussion. In his opening chapter, Peres Da Costa presents an extremely well-balanced discussion of the value of early sound recordings and piano rolls. His comments on the latter are especially appreciated since the accuracy of piano rolls has long been hotly debated. His treatment of the subject is both comprehensive and fair, with descriptions of the technical procedures involved in both sound recordings and piano rolls, as well as a careful noting of the limitations presented by each. Peres Da Costa's book is based upon the premise that such early recordings present us with an important historical picture of performance practice during the romantic period. Many of the recordings he considers date from the earliest years of the twentieth century, and some are even from the latter years of the preceding century. This evidence of performance practice and style has only recently begun to elicit sufficient interest from scholars, certainly long overdue. The second chapter deals with what is perhaps the most characteristic aspect of many pianists trained in the nineteenth century namely the practice of not synchronizing the two hands. Peres Da Costa refers to this as dislocation, and it traditionally involved delaying certain melody notes so that they sound after the bass (occasionally before) rather than simultaneously with the bass. This is followed in the next chapter by a thorough discussion of unnotated arpeggiation, also an example of non-synchronization in which notes of a chord are sounded individually (usually lowest note to top note) rather than being sounded simultaneously. Chapter Four is concerned with various aspects of rhythmic alteration, customarily involving a flexible placement of melodic notes that often leads to non-synchronization of the melody and accompaniment. In his fifth and final chapter, Peres Da Costa discusses tempo modification, which involves varying degrees of deviation from strict or metronomical tempo. All of the aforementioned performance practices were relatively prevalent among pianists trained in the nineteenth century, and the evidence for this is found not only in written commentary and contemporary pedagogical texts but also among the multitude of recordings that Peres Da Costa has examined. Yet he notes with justifiable surprise that there are often contradictions between the recordings and contemporaneous written texts. For example, recordings of a pianist might demonstrate significant dislocation of the hands, while the same pianist might have left a written text condemning the practice. The author offers no convincing explanation for this, but his research certainly compels us to consider both the written and aural evidence when discussing an appropriate approach to the performance of music from the romantic period. While I generally have much praise for Peres Da Costa, I do have a few reservations. …

A MIDI Sequencer That Widens Access to the Compositional Possibilities of Novel Tunings

March 01 2012 A MIDI Sequencer That Widens Access to the Compositional Possibilities of Novel Tunings Anthony Prechtl, Anthony Prechtl *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Andrew J. Milne, Andrew J. Milne *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Simon Holland, Simon Holland *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Robin Laney, Robin Laney *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar David B. Sharp David B. Sharp *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com†Computing Department The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA UK andymilne@tonalcentre.orgs.holland@open.ac.ukr.c.laney@open.ac.uk**Department of Design, Development, Environment and Materials The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA UK d.sharp@open.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Anthony Prechtl *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com Andrew J. Milne *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com Simon Holland *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com Robin Laney *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com David B. Sharp *Music, Mind & Technology Department of Music PL 35(M) 40014 University of Jyväskylä, Finland aprechtl@gmail.com†Computing Department The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA UK andymilne@tonalcentre.orgs.holland@open.ac.ukr.c.laney@open.ac.uk**Department of Design, Development, Environment and Materials The Open University Walton Hall, Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire, MK7 6AA UK d.sharp@open.ac.uk Online ISSN: 1531-5169 Print ISSN: 0148-9267 © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2012 Computer Music Journal (2012) 36 (1): 42–54. https://doi.org/10.1162/COMJ_a_00104 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Anthony Prechtl, Andrew J. Milne, Simon Holland, Robin Laney, David B. Sharp; A MIDI Sequencer That Widens Access to the Compositional Possibilities of Novel Tunings. Computer Music Journal 2012; 36 (1): 42–54. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/COMJ_a_00104 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsComputer Music Journal Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Automatically extracting performance data from recordings of trained singers.

ABSTRACT - Recorded music offers a wealth of information for studying practice. This paper examines the challenges of automatically extracting information from audio recordings of the singing voice and discusses our technique for automati catty extracting information such as note timings, intonation, vibrato rates, and dynamics. An experiment is also presented that focuses on the tuning of semitones in solo soprano performances of Schubert's Ave Maria by non-professional and professional singers. We found a small decrease in size of intervals with a leading tone function only in the non-professional group. KEYWORDS - vocal intonation, analysis, audio annotation This paper describes the challenges that arise when attempting to automatically extract pitchrelated data from recordings of the singing voice. The first section of the paper provides an overview of the history of analyzing recorded performances. The second section describes an algorithm for automatically extracting data from recordings of the singing voice where a score of the is available. The algorithm first identifies note onsets and offsets. Once the onsets and offsets have been determined, intonation, vibrato, and dynamic characteristics can be calculated for each note. The main experiment of the paper, described in the third section, is a study of intonation in solo vocal performance, where both the note onsets and offsets and fundamental frequency were estimated automatically. In the study, six non-professional and six professional sopranos performed Schubert's Ave Maria three times a cappella and three times with a recorded piano accompaniment. Our analysis of these recordings focused on the intonation of ascending and descending semitones. We found that the A-Bl, intervals with a leading tone function were on average 8 cents smaller than the non-leading tone A-Bb, but that their average size was approximately the same as the other semitones performed in the piece, regardless of intervallic direction or accompaniment. PREVIOUS WORK ON THE ANALYSIS OF RECORDED PERFORMANCES Interest in studying recorded performances dates back almost as far as the birth of recordable media, beginning with Dayton Miller's (1916) work on visualized pitch information in recordings with phonophotographic apparati. The psychologist Carl Seashore and colleagues at the University of Iowa also undertook extensive work in analysis (Seashore, 1938) employing a number of techniques to study recorded performances. Piano performances were studied from both piano rolls and films of the movement of the hammers during the performance. The team also undertook numerous studies of singing. Schoen (1922) studied five performances of Gounod's setting of the Ave Maria. He found that tuning depended on the direction of the line: notes following a lower tone tended to be flatter whereas notes followed by a higher note tended to be sharper. In general the singers were sharper than either equal temperament or just intonation. Easley's study of vibrato in opera singers found that the rate of the singer's vibrato was faster and the depth broader in songs from opera as compared to concert songs (Easley, 1932). Bartholomew (1934) studied vibrato along with other acoustic features of the singing voice in an attempt to define good singing. He observed the vibrato to be sinusoidal in nature and its rate to be approximately 6-7 Hz. H. G. Seashore (1936) also looked at Gounod's setting of the Ave Maria, as well as Handel's Messiah. He studied nine performances and focused on the connections, or glides, between notes. He was able to correlate glide extent with direction, finding that glide extent was larger going up than going down. Miller (1936) provided a large amount of detail through performance scores, though a lot of the data was not analyzed. His study of vibrato found that the rate of vibrato fell between 5. …

Roll Out Beethoven

To judge from literature produced in England around the turn of the twentieth century, the Edwardian period was a noisy one. The development of the player piano and the possibility provided by piano rolls for storing more music than previously helped introduce classical music to the masses. However, this process of democratisation resulted in confusion between music and noise. By analysing five Edwardian novels influenced by the player piano discourse, this article will argue that dealing with music in fiction was a means of disposing of musical waste.

John Philip Sousa and “The Menace of Mechanical Music”

AbstractIn 1906Appleton's Magazinepublished John Philip Sousa's most celebrated—and vitriolic—article, “The Menace of Mechanical Music.” In it Sousa predicts that piano rolls and recordings will end amateur music making in the United States. Modern writers have often condemned Sousa as a hypocrite (the Sousa Band was itself a major recording ensemble) and chastised him for failing to see the cultural and financial benefits of mechanical music. But, in fact, Sousa's article was part of a larger scheme to gain public support for the 1909 copyright revision. It was also just one step in Sousa's lifelong battle for composers' rights, a battle with five distinct phases: (1) the debate over the right of public performance precipitated by the success of Gilbert and Sullivan in the United States, (2) a test of the limits of contractual obligations between performers and managers, (3) the instigation of an international copyright law, (4) the battle over mechanical rights, and (5) the ability of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to collect royalties as related to public performance.

Non‐Book Items in US Public Libraries

Libraries tend to be associated with books, but in practice they have lent a variety of media to meet the interests and media practices of their users. Early in the twentieth century, public libraries circulated images, such as photographs, prints, and lantern slides. They also lent music scores and player piano rolls. Early in the twenty‐first century, audio recordings and video disks account for roughly 25% of public libraries' total circulation. Libraries have adapted to media change in the past and they are likely to continue to adapt to media change in the future. This article is a companion piece to Galbi's article, Book Circulation Per US Public Library User Since 1856, which appeared in PLQ, 27:4 (2008).

Non-Book Items in U.S. Public Libraries

Libraries tend to be associated with books, but in practice they have lent a variety of media to meet the interests and media practices of their users. Early in the twentieth century, public libraries circulated images, e.g. photographs, prints, and lantern slides. They also lent music scores and player piano rolls. Early in the twenty-first century, audio recordings and video disks account for roughly 25% of public libraries' total circulation. Libraries have adapted to media change in the past and they are likely to continue to adapt to media change in the future.