Set Of Songs Research Articles

TopPI: An efficient algorithm for item-centric mining

In this paper, we introduce item-centric mining, a new semantics for mining long-tailed datasets. Our algorithm, TopPI, finds for each item its top-k most frequent closed itemsets. While most mining algorithms focus on the globally most frequent itemsets, TopPI guarantees that each item is represented in the results, regardless of its frequency in the database.TopPI allows users to efficiently explore Web data, answering questions such as “what are the k most common sets of songs downloaded together with the ones of my favorite artist?”. When processing retail data consisting of 55 million supermarket receipts, TopPI finds the itemset “milk, puff pastry” that appears 10,315 times, but also “frangipane, puff pastry” and “nori seaweed, wasabi, sushi rice” that occur only 1120 and 163 times, respectively. Our experiments with analysts from the marketing department of our retail partner demonstrate that item-centric mining discover valuable itemsets. We also show that TopPI can serve as a building-block to approximate complex itemset ranking measures such as the p-value.Thanks to efficient enumeration and pruning strategies, TopPI avoids the search space explosion induced by mining low support itemsets. We show how TopPI can be parallelized on multi-cores and distributed on Hadoop clusters. Our experiments on datasets with different characteristics show the superiority of TopPI when compared to standard top-k solutions, and to Parallel FP-Growth, its closest competitor.

Performance and Autoethnography in Historical Ethnomusicology: Differentiating the Viola and the Violão

Abstract This article proposes the combination of performance and autoethnography as alternative methods to make use of musical scores concerning the viola (five-course guitar) and the violão (six-course guitar) in historical ethnomusicology. The author performs and records the same set of songs on the viola and the violão, and based on the multidimensionality of the interaction performer/instrument, writes an autoethnography differentiating his experiences in playing at both chordophones. This approach strives for overcoming the duality body/mind in academic musical research and comprises the embodied knowledge that arises from experience as a complementary epistemology to the corpus of knowledge about these instruments. Moreover, it is added the professional viewpoint of the virtuoso viola player Ivan Vilela who, interviewed by the author, gives his impressions about the differences in ergonomics and playing technics between those chordophones.

Teaching biochemistry online at Oregon State University.

A strategy for growing online biochemistry courses is presented based on successes in ecampus at Oregon State University. Four free drawing cards were key to the effort-YouTube videos, iTunes U online free course content, an Open Educational Resource textbook-Biochemistry Free and Easy, and a fun set of educational songs known as the Metabolic Melodies. © 2016 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 45(1):25-30, 2017.

Musical Similarity and Commonness Estimation Based on Probabilistic Generative Models of Musical Elements

This paper proposes a novel concept we call musical commonness, which is the similarity of a song to a set of songs; in other words, its typicality. This commonness can be used to retrieve representative songs from a set of songs (e.g. songs released in the 80s or 90s). Previous research on musical similarity has compared two songs but has not evaluated the similarity of a song to a set of songs. The methods presented here for estimating the similarity and commonness of polyphonic musical audio signals are based on a unified framework of probabilistic generative modeling of four musical elements (vocal timbre, musical timbre, rhythm, and chord progression). To estimate the commonness, we use a generative model trained from a song set instead of estimating musical similarities of all possible song-pairs by using a model trained from each song. In experimental evaluation, we used two song-sets: 3278 Japanese popular music songs and 415 English songs. Twenty estimated song-pair similarities for each element and each song-set were compared with ratings by a musician. The comparison with the results of the expert ratings suggests that the proposed methods can estimate musical similarity appropriately. Estimated musical commonnesses are evaluated on basis of the Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients between the estimated commonness of each song and the number of songs having high similarity with the song. Results of commonness evaluation show that a song having higher commonness is similar to songs of a song set.

Affect-incongruency in emotional responses to music.

The appeal of expressively sad music has long been a topic of fascination among scholars, in large part because it ostensibly contradicts the hedonic principle: Why would people willingly expose themselves to sounds that express suffering? Wouldn't this merely provoke or heighten personal feelings of distress (Levinson, 1990)? On consideration, this paradox may be largely, if not fully, resolved by considering the myriad ways in which sad music, like other forms of expressively sad media, may be rewarding to listeners (Sachs, Damasio, & Habibi, 2015; Taruffi & Koelsch, 2014). For instance, sad music may be aesthetically pleasing, with beautiful melodies and harmonies, rich timbres, and artfully resolved tensions (Huron, 2006; Vuoskoski, Thompson, McIlwain, & Eerola, 2012). It may allow individuals to empathize with the composer or performer, providing valuable insight into the human condition (Oliver & Raney, 2011) or enable favorable comparisons between the listener's own plight and that of the musician, whose grief is captured in song (Zillmann, 2000). Listening to sad music may also help individuals prepare themselves emotionally for social interactions in which sadness would be normatively appropriate, such as a funeral or hospital visit (Martin, 2001; Oliver, 2008).Other hypotheses regarding the appeal of sad music lend prominence to its potential role in mood repair. For example, it has long been argued that listening to sad music may be cathartic for individuals in sad affective states, helping them to purge themselves of sorrow by expressing their painful feelings more fully (Taruffi & Koelsch, 2014). It has also been suggested that sad music fosters the sense among individuals in sad affective states that the composer or performer can relate to their feelings, thereby making them feel less alone (DeMarco, Taylor, & Friedman, 2015). In a similar vein, sad songs may contain lyrics that help individuals in states of sadness gain insight into the loss they have experienced and/or provide them with clues regarding how to cope (Oliver, 2008; Taylor & Friedman, 2015). An extensive recent qualitative study by Van den Tol and Edwards (2013) found that when asked to describe their own motivations for listening to self-identified sad music, participants listed most of the reasons detailed above and additionally emphasized the use of such music as a memory trigger that would help them recall and reexperience episodes in their lives, particularly those that involved significant others whom they missed and wished to feel close to again (see also, Eerola, Peltola, & Vuoskoski, 2015).A number of recent studies have provided evidence consistent with the notion that sadness breeds an affinity for sad music. For instance, Lee, Andrade, and Palmer (2013) presented participants with a set of hypothetical losses (e.g., losing someone you love; failing an exam) and asked them to choose whether they would prefer to hear expressively cheerful or sad music following each of these sad life events. Participants overwhelmingly believed that they would opt to hear expressively sad music in the aftermath of such events, especially if they involved the loss of a significant other. Research using lab-based affect inductions in place of hypothetical judgments has also appeared to support the notion that misery loves company in terms of music choice. For example, Chen, Zhou, and Bryant (2007) induced sadness in participants by showing them a clip from a documentary about the personal lives of soldiers who were killed in combat in Iraq. Afterward, during a brief music-listening session, participants were asked to freely choose from a set of popular songs that had been pretested to be either expressively happy or sad. Results revealed that participants in sad affective states were at least initially inclined to select affect-congruent music, although the tendency generally diminished over time. More recently, Hunter et al. …

Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context by Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach

Reviewed by: Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context by Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach Adam Knight Gilbert Manuscripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context. By Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach. (Music in Context.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xxi, 324 p. ISBN 978-1-1070-6-2634. $99.99] In the introduction and concluding essay to Manu scripts and Medieval Song: Inscription, Performance, Context, editors Helen Deeming and Elizabeth Eva Leach describe their goal of re-examining important but overlooked sources and repertories, in three ways: Inscription, Performance, and Context. “Inscription” considers the benefits of viewing the repertory, text, or image as an integrated part of a complete source, rather than as a discrete entity divorced from its larger source, arguing for “a wider, more inclusive view of the nature of musical inscription and musical reading” (p. 272). “Performance” not only refers to ways in which the repertory might have been performed, it argues for expanded definitions of what constituted medieval performance to include “ a wide range of performative activities, including . . . singing aloud to an audience, singing aloud alongside companions, singing pieces but not necessarily straight through from beginning to end, and singing in a low voice—or even silently—to oneself ” (p. 279). “Context” refers to the editors’ conviction that “the material traces of song, in the form of the manuscripts that house them, can supply . . . a good deal of information about these lost social contexts, as well as providing . . . a direct written context for song that has not been fully acknowledged” (p. 282). To that end, this book gathers studies by respected scholars on ten important sources of medieval collections of and about medieval song. The result is a magisterial collection of studies that will be an indispensable resource for serious students of medieval music, music libraries, and teachers of music history. The studies will be of particular value to those interested in medieval performance, for their information about performance settings and practises, and with their invitation to explore expanded medieval repertories. While the topics do not lend themselves to breezy reading, the writing is never dry, and the chapters serve as models for joining engaging writing and rigorous scholarship. Each chapter introduces the repertory and source in question, seamlessly leading the reader from commonly known (and often inconsistent) names to their standard RISM sigla. This is followed by a detailed account of the history and current state of scholarship of each source and its repertory, including each author’s contribution. Case studies on individual compositions, images, and texts provide compelling arguments for how each repertory can be better understood within the larger context of its source, culture, and performance traditions. Each chapter also provides a concise and helpful summary of the issues raised. Sam Barrett views the Latin versus collection of “the earliest medieval songbook”, F-Pn Lat. 1154, as an integral part of a varied collection of litanies, prayers, and other texts. Using paleography and textual clues, he places the origins of the manuscript in the Abbey of St. Martial of Limoges, offers an informative account of its role in private monastic prayer, and shows how [End Page 313] its prayers reflect Alcuin’s instructions for personal devotion. Jeremy Llewellyn considers the “Cambridge Songs” as part of a larger collection, GB-Cu Gg.V.35, that includes theoretical texts and glosses. He places the songs in a rich pedagogical context, recounts the complex nature of variants and “a panoply of dialogues” between repertories, and considers the role of the “careful cantor” as one charged with both practical and moral responsibility. Rachel Golden examines monophonic and polyphonic settings of Latin song in the twelfth-century Aquitanian versarium GB-Lbl Add. 36881. In addition to placing the source in context of other versaria, she identifies images prompting readers to make the sign of the cross as a performative cue. Her fine editions of the monophonic Ave mater salvatoris and the two-voice Quam felix cubiculum, enhanced by analysis founded in contemporary theological allegory, inspired me to find her dissertation (“Devotion to the Virgin Mary in Twelfth-Century Aquitanian Versus [Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000]), and left me glad I...

Reinvestigating affect-congruency in music choice: Does misery really love company?

How does sadness shape our preferences for listening to expressively sad versus joyful music? According to classic moodmanagement theory (Zillmann, 1988a, 1988b), individuals will gravitate toward music that maintains or promotes positive affective experience. As such, those in sad, relative to happy or neutral, moods should be especially inclined to choose affect-incongruent music that will distract them from upsetting thoughts and help restore their good cheer. However, it has been countered that states of sadness may have the very opposite effect on music preference, prompting selective exposure to songs that are congruent with the emotion-eliciting event in terms of their thematic and/or expressive content (e.g., Knobloch, 2003; Oliver, 1993; Zillmann, 2000). For example, after a romantic breakup, individuals may listen to love-lamenting songs, which might help them understand what they are feeling and provide insight into how to cope with their heartbreak (Gibson, Aust, & Zillmann, 2000; Oliver & Raney, 2011). Sad music may also permit listeners to compare their plight with the imagined plight of the composer or performer, making their own troubles seem less unique and thereby less worrisome (Zillmann, 2000). Additionally, individuals may use sad music to help them maintain sad affective states when these are construed as normatively appropriate in a particular social context, such as a funeral or a visit to an ailing friend in the hospital (Martin, 2001; Oliver, 2008). In this way, the choice of affect-congruent, expressively sad music may ultimately promote positive feelings by facilitating emotion regulation.Experimental Research on Affect-Congruency in Music ChoiceIn recent years, there have been a number of studies aimed at empirically assessing whether sadness in response to specific life events reliably influences music choice in the immediate aftermath of these events and, if so, whether the pattern of choice may be best characterized as affect-congruent or affect-incongruent. For instance, Lee, Andrade, and Palmer (2013)-and more recently, DeMarco, Taylor, and Friedman (2015)-asked their participants to consider a variety of hypothetical sad life experiences and to indicate what type of music they would prefer to listen to following each of these adverse events. Participants' intuitions regarding their prospective music preferences were clear: They overwhelmingly believed that they would choose expressively sad music in response to sad life events, especially if these involved the loss of a vital interpersonal relationship. However, as countless studies of human judgment have confirmed (e.g., Gilbert, 2006; Loewenstein, 1996), people's intuitions regarding their future preferences often miss the mark, raising the issue as to whether individuals indeed gravitate toward affect-congruent musical fare when induced into states of sadness.To circumvent such concerns, a number of lab-based studies have experimentally manipulated sadness before assessing music preference. For instance, Knobloch and Zillmann (2002) led participants to experience either positive, neutral, or negative affective states by means of false feedback on an ostensible test of social sensitivity. Afterward, during a short music-listening session, participants were asked to freely choose from a set of popular songs that had been pretested to be either expressively joyful or sad. Results revealed that individuals in negative affective states spent more time listening to expressively happy music than those in positively valent states, offering evidence for affect-inconsistent preference. However, the authors concede that their affect induction may not only have manipulated sadness, but frustration as well, and in a proportion that was unclear (due to the failure to include appropriate manipulation checks). Chen, Zhou, and Bryant (2007) addressed this issue by conceptually replicating Knobloch and Zillmann's (2002) study using a more targeted induction of sadness in which they showed participants a clip from a documentary about the personal lives of soldiers who ultimately perished in the Iraq War. …

Sound of the Break: Jazz and the Failures of Emancipation

This article analyzes four musical works written for the commemorative centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, 1963: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite , featuring the vocalist Abbey Lincoln; Duke Ellington’s theatrical production My People ; John Coltrane’s “Alabama”; and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam.” This diverse set of songs expresses the contradiction of Black life and death in America during the modern civil rights movement. Within the structure of each musical piece is a tension described as “the break” in which resistance to the disavowal of Black suffering and the demand for true freedom is performed. The analysis of such breaks helps explain the tenuous position of Black performers in this moment, the precipice they navigated onstage in 1963, as well as a larger tension that undergirded the Black freedom struggle: namely, the impulse to celebrate liberation against a cognizance of its failure to materialize in any substantive form.

Repertuar liturgiczno-muzyczny w rękopiśmiennym graduale karmelitańskim (b.s.) z Obór

The article presents the content of the Carmelite gradual from Obory. Having compared the repertoire of the Carmelite book with the Roman gradual, it can be stated that the Carmelite mass liturgy comprises a bit different compositions. Only eight of the formularies proprium de tempore contain complete or almost complete sets of songs. Undoubtedly, choosing songs for the formularies of the liturgical days in such a selective way indicates that the codex served mainly a particular performer and that this gradual contains only some songs chosen from a different (complete) codex for a cantor. Out of 278 songs in the codex of Obory (including psalms and verses) 235 are the same as in the Roman gradual. Some of the song sets follow the tradition, while other sets do not. This kind of lability in dealing with the liturgical repertoire in relation to the Roman tradition implies that the book was created exclusively for the local monastery.

Un himno, una historia: 100 años del Himno Antioqueño

En el marco de este debate se llega a poner en duda la vigencia de la llamada “antioqueñidad” y de sus símbolos. Uno de ellos, el Himno Antioqueño fue confeccionado a principios del siglo XX por un compositor de gran valía y presencia en la ciudad, sobre los versos de un poeta yarumaleño, enfermo de libertad. Es posible que el músico caucano Gonzalo Vidal apenas sea recordado por los colombianos como creador de unas pocas obras. Tal vez haya sido presentado oficialmente y para el común de las gentes sólo como el compositor de las famosas Estaciones del Viacrucis, sobre un texto del jesuita Tomás de Villarraga, que se cantan indefectiblemente en las Semanas Santas colombianas, y de varias obras antioqueñistas de noble aliento épico, como el Himno Antioqueño, sobre un popular texto poético de Epifanio Mejía. El presente texto realiza un recorrido por diversos momentos, indagando sobre la configuración del himno antioqueño, desde publicación del poema de Epifanio Mejía en 1868, hasta la versión que conocemos hoy con música de Gonzalo Vidal.

“A Ballad Intituled a Pleasant Newe Jigge”: The Relationship between the Broadside Ballad and the Dramatic Jig

Dialogues in song set to popular tunes describes both the broadside ballad and the dramatic jig, and no doubt both forms of popular entertainment are related. If the dramatic jig was a sung-drama featuring props, disguising, and dance, to be acted out on the common stage when a play was done, might the broadside ballad also be a script to be acted out as a dramatic performance? This article considers the relationship between ballad and jig and explores the extent to which the surviving broadside ballads from the seventeenth century may preserve in print vestiges of the stage jig.

Torture, Terror, Digitality: A Conversation with Tony Cokes

Post-conceptual artist Tony Cokes's Evil series (2001-present) interrogates the ideological underpinnings of the on Terror. Through the critical reframing of appropriated texts and images, Cokes infuses a new legibility into material that has remained largely hidden in plain sight. Refunctioning streams of poorly read/ forgotten information, Cokes creates an architecture of wreading (1) for the digital age. Cokes is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University and lives in Providence, Rhode Island. His works have been exhibited at such venues as the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Guggenheim Museum in New York; Centre Georges Pompidou and La Cinematheque Francaise in Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) in Los Angeles; Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe; and Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. He has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, Creative Capital, and the Getty Research Institute. What follows is taken from a series of exchanges, via email and in person, begun in February 2015--when Cokes presented his work in the context of Distracted Wreading [From Structural Film to Digital Poetics], an exhibition at Union College in Schenectady, New York. JENELLE TROXELL: I'd like to discuss your Evil series and how it relates more generally to your extended body of work. Could you say a few words about the series in terms of how you conceived of it and some of its overarching themes? TONY COKES: The Evil series came about in the period after the events of September 11, 2001. Besides feeling inundated by seeing more American flags than I recalled from any earlier period in my life, I was struck by the return of the concept of evil to contemporary political discourse. The repeated use of the term (often in juxtaposition with its alleged opposite) seemed to be puzzling, yet highly rhetorically effective during the years of the George W. Bush presidency. Phenomena like the ongoing War on Terror, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Department of Homeland Security's color alert system really frightened and angered me and required a response. I began collecting articles, mostly journalistic, some theoretical, to map these things as they happened. I was particularly interested in these texts as or hidden in plain sight. I was also aware that other artists were working with similar materials (multiple projects based on keyword searches of Bush's speeches, for example), and I wanted to align with those practices as a small act of solidarity and resistance. My premise is that a different reading protocol and context might produce new conditions of possibility and legibility for these already widely, yet poorly, read events/histories/articles. JT: From where does the title derive? TC: The title came to me through an encounter with the interview On Evil: An Interview With Alain Badiou conducted by Christopher Cox and Molly Whalen, which appeared in Cabinet magazine in Winter 2001-02. Excerpts from the interview became text elements in Evil/Shrink (2003), the first completed work in the series. That first video, which featured footage taken of Manhattan before and after 9/11, was composed of two excerpts from a large, still incomplete multichannel installation project called Shrink. That project was to feature three simultaneous yet different views of the same area of the New York City skyline accompanied by a variety of theoretical, artistic, and journalistic texts. All the video was set to the same soundtrack: a set of songs from the 1998 album Shrink, produced by the Bavarian experimental rock band the Notwist. JT: Do you see this project as an elaboration of some of your earlier concerns? TC: I think my work has always had an interest in reframing/ disrupting already existing cultural artifacts (visual, textual, or sonic) to produce different possibilities for reading and meaning. …

Crafting a Music Community: Making Music and Musicians in Concert

In this webtext the author(s) will explore the process of writing, recording, and producing a song, within a group of musicians & sound engineers who have all be fostered/encouraged in some way through participation in a in Kalamazoo, MI. The goal of the project is threefold: (1) To actually explore the timeline of production (an EP-length set of songs) with the group, who are all working from amateur status -- learning the tools, practices, and skills as they compose; (2) to explore (through short video vignettes) how this particular production has been shaped by participation in the community over the last several years; (3) To explore the artifact (one of the songs) in more detail, unpacking how each member of the group adds to not only the overall practice, but to their understanding of the music and their own musical skills.

Musical rhythmic pattern extraction using relevance of communities in networks

The rhythmic background of a musical piece is usually composed of featured elements that define the musical genre. For each song, such elements form rhythmic patterns, the most repetitive ones defines the rhythm of a specific musical genre and the less frequent ones correspond to fortuitous patterns that comply a transition, diversification, introduction or conclusion function. In this paper, we introduce a network-based method for automatic extraction of rhythmic pattern of a single song. We also propose a method for rhythmic summarization of a set of songs from the same genre, artist, and combinations of genres and artists. The method can be used to extract any type of rhythm pattern, both monophonic and polyphonic, represented by symbolic data. A musical piece is generally formed by one or more predefined rhythmic patterns and such patterns are composed of rhythmic cells (RCs), which are groups of rhythmic figures derived from nth division of a larger rhythmic figure. At the pre-processing and encoding phases of the proposed method, the RCs of drums percussion lines are represented in duration-weighted notation (DWN). Then, the vector of DWN is encoded to be free of the dimensional dependence on the number of figures in the RC. After that, a network is constructed from the encoded DWN using the method proposed in this paper. We find that the rhythmic patterns of the musical work are related to the formation of communities in the constructed music network. In order to confirm such a finding, three network community detection algorithms are applied: Modularity Optimization algorithm and Louvain algorithm for the disjoint community detection, and Bayesian Non-negative Matrix Factorization algorithm for detecting overlapped communities. Furthermore, a new measure for quantifying the relevance of communities to differentiate types of rhythmic patterns is introduced. The proposed technique has been applied to automatic extraction of rhythmic pattern and rhythmic summarization of the songs of The Beatles, Bob Marley, and other artists, respectively. The results show that the method of extraction and summarization has good performance.

Baudelaire and Electronica: Strange Voices and Ruth White's 1960s Experimentations

This article examines the under-frequented musical contexts for Baudelaire’s poetry, notably 1960s American experimental electronica (Ruth White, Flowers of Evil, 1969). By focusing on the role of the composer-translator, this article tests the hypothesis that the composer-translator adds further layers of complexity and distancing to the voices of his poetry, in such a way as to create challenging new soundworlds which shatter the already fragile categories of ‘poetry’ and ‘music’ as distinct elements. The alliance between text and sound, it is suggested, becomes increasingly complicated by dislocated voices in a foreign tongue and in an experimental musical genre such that the relationship between poem and music is suffused with heightened levels of strangeness. Moreover, by critiquing the dual (but complicated) role of the composer-translator, it is possible to re-examine accepted tenets of translation theory by pitting the notion of the translator as ‘literary critic’ (Scott: 2000) alongside recent word-music theory that perceives the composer as ‘critical reader’ (Allis: 2005). It is suggested that unusual song settings of Baudelaire (using the composer’s own translation) expand our understanding of Baudelaire’s poetic palette, his use of voice(s), and the cultural reception of his work.

Song Recommendation System Using Maximal b-Matching

The last decade has witnessed a fundamental paradigm shift on how information content is distributed among people. Nowadays, an increasing number of platforms allow everyone to participate both in information production and information consumption. The phenomenon has been coined as democratization of content. However, as the opportunities to find relevant information and relevant audience increases, so does the complexity of a system that would allow suppliers and consumers to meet in the most efficient way. Our motivation is building a “featured item” component for social-media applications. Such a component would provide recommendations to consumers each time they login the system. The existing system follows either collaborative filtering or content based filtering. Collaborative filtering methods are based on collecting and analyzing a large amount of information on user’s behaviours, activities or preferences and predicting what users will like based on their similarity to other users. Content-based filtering methods are based on a description of the item and a profile of the user's preference. Both of these methods require input from the user in the form of ratings or other user's likes. But social content matching takes into account only the user's preferences and also the capacity constraints. For each item 't' and each user 'u', consider constraints on the maximum number of edges that t and u can participate in the matching. These capacity constraints can be estimated by the activity of each user and the relative frequency with which items need to be delivered. Here we introduce the concept called b-matching goal is to find a matching that satisfies all capacity constraints and maximizes the total weight of the edges in the matching. The result of b-matching is the set of songs that are to be recommended to the user based on his likes.

From the Center in the Middle: Working Tambura Bands and the Construction of the In Between in Croatia and its Intimates

Prelude: Miroslav Skoro's Twentieth Anniversary Concert In November 2009, Croatian pop singer Miroslav Skoro performed in front of some twenty thousand fans at Arena Zagreb, the capital city's much lauded new sports hall. This was the second largest audience drawn by Croatian act since the hall's opening the previous December, (1) testament to Skoro's continuing status as one of Croatia's most popular patriotic performers (as well as television star and, in recent years, politician and record mogul). Aside from the notably large attendance, the concert in Zagreb was of particular significance to Skoro for its timing: held on the twentieth day of November, his performance celebrated twenty years' work in the music industry as professional singer and songwriter. Accompanied by his band (on backup vocals, tenor saxophone, acoustic and electric guitars, keyboard, drums, and electric bass) and number of guest musicians from past projects and from his family, Skoro performed repertoire from throughout his career and thereby commemorated his twenty years of hit songs and his many musical collaborations with these and other musicians. Skoro spoke to those of us in the audience about the significance of several of these individuals to his life and career, drawing particular attention to one who, although unable to attend, loomed large over the event: legendary Pittsburgh-born player of traditional tambura chordophones, Jerry Grcevich. This longtime musical collaborator of Skoro's had arranged most of the singer's early hits and had singly performed the accompaniment (of overdubbed melody and rhythm tamburas) to each of the songs on Skoro's first and third albums. Skoro singled out for us song (Ne Dirajte Mi Ravnicu--Don't Touch My Plain) that he had written and recorded with Grcevich twenty years earlier while studying in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (where the singer had joined his newly wedded Croatian-American wife Kim Ann Skoro, nee Luzaich). Upon their release in the early 1990s, Skoro's original 1989 recording of Ne Dirajte Mi Ravnicu, as well as an immensely successful cover version by tambura band Zlatni Dukati, had resonated strongly with his newly independent but heavily war-torn country. Skoro acknowledged the song's widespread popularity, announcing that it had become a song that is no longer mine, but all of yours, and crediting it with inaugurating his musical career. (2) Skoro also credited Grcevich as the other person responsible for writing the song and told us that the famed tamburas (tambura player (3)) unfortunately could not be there to play it himself because of illness in his family. In lieu of personal appearance, Skoro then had video that Grcevich had recorded projected onto large screen that was suspended above and behind the stage and flanked by two enormous installations of LED light-panels in the shape of the roman numeral X (identifying the twentieth [XX] anniversary concert). High above the musicians, Grcevich's face appeared on the screen, expressing his regrets in English and sending his best wishes for the concert, all to loud cheers from the audience. As Skoro then sang the song that they had written twenty years prior to the November twentieth concert, twenty thousand fans sang along through each of several verses, choruses, and even instrumental breaks. Skoro, however, had planned yet another iteration of the number 20: although Grcevich could not be there, he announced, twenty local tamburasi would accompany his singing. Skoro had invited semiprofessional tambura bands Slavonski Becari, Ravnica, and Lyra, all from his city of birth, Osijek, to perform with him. In the middle of the concert, they assembled on stage in long row, relieving the regular band for short set of songs from this early period of Skoro's career when he sang almost exclusively to the accompaniment of tambura groups. (4) Tambura fans generally consider these the three best ensembles in Osijek, and two of them share long history of performance and mutual influence with Skoro. …

Scott Walker sings Jacques Brel: Translation, authorship and the circulation of music

By focusing on a set of Jacques Brel's songs as covered in English by the American singer Scott Walker, this article addresses the complexity of the production and circulation of cultural products, uncovering the important yet frequently obscured role of a range of agents. Combining approaches from sociology and cultural studies, it examines the ways in which “Brel” was integrated within Walker's work and artistic persona and this in turn exemplifies how an imported product can become the object of new strategic uses in the field of reception. The article also addresses the multiple operations involved in this process, which are not limited to textual translation, but include further discursive and non-textual practices. Finally, issues of reception and authorship are raised to show how the study of translation can become an exploratory tool in historical and cultural analysis.

The iPod Model

We introduce a Voter Model variant, inspired by social evolution of musical preferences. In our model, agents have preferences over a set of songs and upon meeting update their own preferences incrementally towards those of the other agents they meet. Using the spectral gap of an associated Markov chain, we give a geometry dependent result on the asymptotic consensus time of the model.

Design and Realization of Music Retrieval System Based on Feature Content

As computer technology develops rapidly, retrieval systems have also undergone great changes. People are no longer contented with singular retrieval means, but are trying many other ways to retrieve feature content. When it comes to music, however, the complexity of sound is still preventing its retrieval from moving further forward. To solve this problem, systematic analysis and study is carried out on music retrieval system based on feature content. A music retrieval system model based on feature content consisting of technical approaches for processing and retrieving of extraction symbols of music feature content is built and realized. An SML model is proposed and tested on two different types of song sets. The result shows good performance of the system. Besides, the shortfalls of the model are also noted and the future prospects of the music retrieval system based on feature content are outlined.