The field of music query has grown from tentative beginnings in bibliographical systems of earlier decades to a substantial area of interdisciplinary studies in little more than a decade. This volume assembles recent studies from Europe and North America concerned with the query and analysis of musical data. Among these, methods for the synchronization of sound and symbolic data, for automatic analysis through perceptual rules, and for computing a "transportation" distance for thematic comparison are described.
In this book, David Temperley addresses a fundamental question about music cognition: how do we extract basic kinds of musical information, such as meter, phrase structure, counterpoint, pitch spelling, harmony, and key from music as we hear it? Taking a computational approach, Temperley develops models for generating these aspects of musical structure. The models he proposes are based on preference rules, which are criteria for evaluating a possible structural analysis of a piece of music.
Musicians begin formal training by acquiring a body of musical concepts commonly known as musicianship. These concepts underlie the musical skills of listening, performance, and composition. Like humans, computer music programs can benefit from a systematic foundation of musical knowledge. This book explores the technology of implementing musical processes such as segmentation, pattern processing, and interactive improvisation in computer programs.
Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics.
Below the level of the musical note lies the realm of microsound, of sound particles lasting less than one-tenth of a second. Recent technological advances allow us to probe and manipulate these pinpoints of sound, dissolving the traditional building blocks of music—notes and their intervals—into a more fluid and supple medium. The sensations of point, pulse (series of points), line (tone), and surface (texture) emerge as particle density increases. Sounds coalesce, evaporate, and mutate into other sounds.
The Virtual Score examines a broad range of approaches to working with musical scores in ways suited to electronic distribution. The first section, on musical representation and interchange, discusses early music and its multiple editorial stances, scores in Braille musical notation (with and without NIFF), the GUIDO format for "adequate" (as opposed to comprehensive) music representation, Extensible Markup Language (XML) and music, and the latest methods for distributing scores online. The second section discusses retrieval and/or analysis of data from encoded melodies.
Interactive music refers to a composition or improvisation in which software interprets live performances to produce music generated or modified by computers. In Composing Interactive Music, Todd Winkler presents both the technical and aesthetic possibilities of this increasingly popular area of computer music. His own numerous compositions have been the laboratory for the research and development that resulted in this book.
How hearing works and how the brain processes sounds entering the ear to provide the listener with useful information are of great interest to psychologists, cognitive scientists, and musicians. However, while a number of books have concentrated on individual aspects of this field, known as psychoacoustics, there has been no comprehensive introductory coverage of the multiple topics encompassed under the term. Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound is the first book to provide that coverage.
Created in 1985 by Barry Vercoe, Csound is one of the most widely used software sound synthesis systems. Because it is so powerful, mastering Csound can take a good deal of time and effort. But this long-awaited guide will dramatically straighten the learning curve and enable musicians to take advantage of this rich computer technology available for creating music.
