We present a novel approach to the analysis of jazz solos based on the categorisation and annotation of musical units on a middle level between single notes and larger form parts. A guideline during development was the hypothesis that these midlevel units (MLU) correspond to the improvising musicians’ playing ideas and action plans. A system of categories was devised, comprising nine main categories (line, lick, theme, quote, melody, rhythm, expressive, fragment, void), 19 subcategories, and 41 sub-subcategories as well as syntactical rules to encode motivic relationships between units. A set of 140 monophonic jazz solos from various jazz styles (traditional, swing, bebop, hardbop, cool jazz, postbop, free jazz) was annotated manually, resulting in 4939 units in total. The median number of midlevel units is 32 per solo and 13.75 per chorus. The average duration is 2.25 s (SD = 1.57 s), in good agreement with the duration of the subjective present. Overall, the most common main category is lick (45.7% of all units), followed by line (31.5%), but distributions of the main MLU types differ significantly between styles and performers. About one quarter (M = 25.1%, SD = 15.3%) of the annotated units have motivic relations to preceding units. The mean length of consecutive motivic chains is 2.8 (SD = 1.4). The amount of motivic relations varies considerably between performers, but not between styles. Based on these first results, we discuss implications for jazz research and options for further applications of the proposed method
This paper pursues two goals. First, we present a generative model for (monophonic) jazz improvisation whose main purpose is testing hypotheses on creative processes during jazz improvisation. It uses a hierarchical Markov model based on mid-level units and the Weimar Bebop Alphabet, with statistics taken from the Weimar Jazz Database. A further ingredient is chord-scale theory to select pitches. Second, as there are several issues with Turing-like evaluation processes for generative models of jazz improvisation, we decided to conduct an exploratory online study to gain further insight while testing our algorithm in the context of a variety of human generated solos by eminent masters, jazz students, and non-professionals in various performance renditions. Results show that jazz experts (64.4% accuracy) but not non-experts (41.7% accuracy) are able to distinguish the computer-generated solos amongst a set of real solos, but with a large margin of error. The type of rendition is crucial when assessing artificial jazz solos because expressive and performative aspects (timbre, articulation, microtiming and band-soloist interaction) seem to be equally if not more important than the syntactical (tone) content. Furthermore, the level of expertise of the solo performer does matter, as solos by non-professional humans were on average rated worse than the algorithmic ones. Accordingly, we found indications that assessments of origin of a solo are partly driven by aesthetic judgments. We propose three possible strategies to install a reliable evaluation process to mitigate some of the inherent problems.
The metaphor of storytelling is widespread among jazz performers and jazz researchers. However, little is known about the precise meaning of this metaphor on an analytical level. The present paper attempts to shed light on the connected semantic field of the metaphor and relate it to its musical basis by investigating time courses of selected musical elements and features in monophonic jazz improvisations. Three explorative studies are carried out using transcriptions of 299 monophonic jazz solos from the Weimar Jazz Database. The first study inspects overall trends using fits of quadratic polynomials onto loudness and pitch curves. The second study does the same using selected features related to intensity, tension and variability over the course of phrases in the solos. The third study examines the distribution of the relative positions of various improvisational ideas in a subset of 116 solos. Results show that certain trends can be found, but not to a large extent. Significant trends most often display arch-shaped curves as expected from classical dramatic models. This is also in accordance with the fact that expressive improvisational ideas are more often found in the last part of a solo, while more relaxed ideas occur earlier. All in all, jazz improvisations show a wide range of variation and no single overarching dramatic model could be identified.
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