Midlevel analysis of monophonic jazz solos: A new approach to the study of improvisation

Abstract

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

Duration of playing bursts and redundancy of melodic jazz improvisation in John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

“…Having found this approximate value in poetry and some musical themes, we have uncovered it in Coltrane's improvisation. In the meantime, our initial results have been replicated in the context of a large corpus analysis by Frieler et al (2016), who found similar values in monophonic jazz piano improvisations with longer values for slow music and shorter durations in faster music (also Lothwesen & Frieler, 2012). This information could be useful in developing a formal hierarchical model of jazz improvisation with different temporal layers akin to that developed for driving by Tanida and Pöppel (2006).…”

“…Two-thirds of non-redundant material and one-third of redundant material were interspersed with varying durations of "void" (Frieler et al, 2016) or "sounding pauses" (Behne, 1994). This may be an interesting finding to follow up on, as it could be useful for learners of jazz.…”

"Telling a Story." On the Dramaturgy of Monophonic Jazz Solos

“…The annotation of MLUs was done by four expert annotators. Special care was taken to achieve high inter-rater reliability, which is about 80% for segment borders and around 60% for categories; the most often confused categories are lines and licks (Frieler et al, 2016). For this study, we used the midlevel annotations to examine the differences in relative position of the various midlevel unit categories within a solo.…”

“…These midlevel units are classified into nine main categories (cf. Table 5) with 18 sub-and 38 sub-subcategories (Frieler, Pfleiderer, Abeßer & Zaddach, 2016). The categories were originally developed and condensed from the data until the system was saturated and a code book could be written.…”

Aspects of Tempo and Rhythmic Elaboration in Hindustani Music: A Corpus Study

“…Starting from audio, Frieler et al (2016) performed manual mid-level annotations on a large set of Jazz solo recordings. These annotations have an average length of about 2 s throughout the corpus and represent meaningful categories within the jazz genre.…”