Rhythm Accompaniment Research Articles

Beat It! Music Overloads Novice Dancers

SummaryTogether with melody, harmony, and timbre, rhythm and beat provide temporal structure for movement timing. Such musical features may act as cues to the phrasing and dynamics of a dance choreographed to the music. Novice dancers (N = 54) learned to criterion a novel 32‐s dance‐pop routine, either to full music or to the rhythm of that music. At test, participants recalled the dance to the same music, rhythm, new music, and in silence. If musical features aid memory, then full music during learning and test should result in superior dance recall, whereas if rhythm alone aids memory, then rhythm during learning and test should result in superior recall. The presence of a rhythm accompaniment during learning provided a significantly greater memory advantage for the recall of dance‐pop steps than full music. After learning to full music, silence at test enhanced recall. Findings are discussed in terms of entrainment and cognitive load. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Musically meaningful fitness and mutation for autonomous evolution of rhythm accompaniment

Autonomous evaluation of computer generated musical pieces remains one of the most challenging open problems in evolutionary music composition. This paper introduces the design of novel mutation and fitness operators for autonomous evolution of human-competitive rhythm accompaniment using genetic algorithm. We propose several fitness operators that autonomously evaluate the quality of generated rhythm phrases according to patterns of another accompanying instrument, such as bass or rhythm piano, and according to user's specified criteria such as a density of rhythm accompaniment. In the next, we introduce four musically meaningful mutation operators that alter rhythm consonance, dynamic phrasing, drum stroke types or perform syncopation of rhythm phrases. We also provide a complete example of mutation and fitness settings used for evolution of a rhythm accompaniment to Dizzy Gillespie's "Night In Tunisia" jazz tune.

Automatic background music generation based on actors' mood and motions

AbstractSince adding background music and sound effects even to short animations is not simple, an automatic music generation system would help improve the total quality of computer generated animations. This paper describes a prototype system which automatically generates background music and sound effects for existing animations. The inputs to the system are music parameters (mood types and musical motifs) and motion parameters for individual scenes of an animation. Music is generated for each scene. The key for a scene is determined by considering the mood type and its degree, and the key of the previous scene. The melody for a scene is generated from the given motifs and the chord progression for the scene which is determined according to appropriate rules. The harmony accompaniment for a scene is selected based on the mood type. The rhythm accompaniment for a scene is selected based on the mood type and tempo. The sound effects for motions are determined according to the characteristics and intensity of the motions. Both the background music and sound effects are generated so that the transitions between scenes are smooth.

Rhythm rate and tempo monitor for electronic musical instruments having automatic rhythm accompaniment

First Page

Timbre modulation circuit for electronic musical instruments

First Page

Rhythm accent circuit

In an electronic musical instrument of the type in which pitch selection is achieved by pulse position modulation, and a rhythm accompaniment is played automatically under the direction of a read-only memory, a shift register is used to create pulse position modulation instructions for harmonic footages of the fundamental note, and selected combinations of these footages are rhythm-modulated and rhythm-counter-modulated under the control of logic gates which are responsive to various manually operated stop tabs.

Automatic rhythm accompaniment apparatus in an electronic organ

First Page

Automatic rhythm-accompaniment apparatus for electronic musical instrument

First Page