An Instantaneous Music Notator

Seeger, Charles

doi:10.2307/835791

Cited by 18 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…This limited the number of pieces that could be evaluated. Interest in empirical performance analysis subsequently diminished, in part due to its laboriousness, continuing mainly in the area of ethnomusicology (e.g., Seeger, 1951; Tove, Norman, Isaksson, & Czekajewski, 1966). The resurgence of a more general interest in music performance studies in the late 1970’s coincided with both a movement by musicologists away from equating scores with music and an increased interest in music by cognitive psychologists.…”

Section: Previous Work On the Analysis Of Recorded Performancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatically extracting performance data from recordings of trained singers.

Devaney

Mandel

Ellis

et al. 2011

Psychomusicology: Music, Mind and Brain

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Recorded music offers a wealth of information for studying performance practice. This paper examines the challenges of automatically extracting performance information from audio recordings of the singing voice and discusses our technique for automatically extracting information such as note timings, intonation, mbrato 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.This paper describes the challenges that arise when attempting to automatically extract pitchrelated performance 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 performance data from recordings of the singing voice where a score of the performance 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-B^ intervals with a leading tone function were on average 8 cents smaller than the non-leading tone A-Bl,, 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 PERFORMANCESInterest 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 performance

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Section: Previous Work On the Analysis Of Recorded Performancesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatically extracting performance data from recordings of trained singers.

Devaney

Mandel

Ellis

et al. 2011

Psychomusicology: Music, Mind and Brain

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“…In the US, collectors like John and Alan Lomax recorded these English ballads and other folk songs of rural America (African-American and Anglo-American), all of which helped sparked the US/UK "folk revival" that played an important role in the history of popular music through their influence on artists like Leadbelly, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez (Porter, 1991;Szwed, 2010). This stream saw some of the first applications of computational analysis to musicology, such as when people like Milton Metfessel or Charles Seeger used automated "melographic" transcriptions to analyze microtonality in folk songs (Metfessel, 1928;C. Seeger, 1951) (Fig.…”

Section: The Folk Revival and Tune Family Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative musicology: The science of the world’s music

Savage

2022

Preprint

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What is music, and why did it evolve? How can we understand the unity and diversity found throughout the world’s music? Scientific attempts to answer these questions through cross-cultural comparison stalled during the 20th century and have only recently begun to make a resurgence. In this book, Patrick Savage synthesizes recent advances to outline a new unified theoretical/methodological framework to understand and compare all of the world’s music. This framework takes advantage of new scientific theories and methods – particularly from advances in computer science, psychology, genetic anthropology, and cultural evolution – to apply comparative musicological research to answer longstanding questions about the origins of music and to contemporary issues including music copyright law and UNESCO policy. In doing so, he argues for an inclusive, multidisciplinary field that combines the qualitative methods traditionally employed by musicologists and cultural anthropologists with quantitative methods from the natural sciences.

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“…From the late 1920s, and especially until the 1950s, the American Milton Metfessel (1928) and the Japanese Obata and Kobayashi (1937), as well as Charles Seeger (1951) and the Norwegian Folk Music Institute led by Olav Gurvin, were fascinated with the invention and design of automated notation equipment in order to more carefully and objectively investigate and comparatively analyse the factors leading to movement and change within different musical sounds. Unprecedented precision was particularly achieved with Charles Seeger's design-which later became known as the "melograph"-and with the notation equipment designed by the Norwegian Folk Music Institute (NettI1964:122-25).…”

Section: The Attentions Of the Western Pioneers Of Ethnomusicologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Facing the Predicament of Wordlessness: When We Speak of Certain Musical Sounds

Qia¹,

Ingram²

2014

yearb. tradit. music

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Over more than one hundred years, in the tide of “global westernization,” most of the Chinese words that were once used to describe musical sound have already been displaced by terminology based on that used in western music, especially western musical terminology of the Classical period. The words that were originally used in Chinese discourse—either within the history of literature or spread orally amongst folk musicians—have been lost or forgotten, and the system itself has already disintegrated and been pushed to the edge of today's mainstream discourse.

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An Instantaneous Music Notator

Cited by 18 publications

References 1 publication

Automatically extracting performance data from recordings of trained singers.

Automatically extracting performance data from recordings of trained singers.

Comparative musicology: The science of the world’s music

Facing the Predicament of Wordlessness: When We Speak of Certain Musical Sounds

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