Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 1, 2018

Trucks and beer (Music)

Filed under: Music,Text Analytics,Text Mining — Patrick Durusau @ 6:13 pm

Trucks and beer by John W. Miller.

From the post:

Inspired by a post on Big-ish Data, I’ve started working on a textual analysis of popular country music.

More specifically, I scraped Ranker.com for a list of the top female and male country artists of the last 100 years and used my python wrapper for the Genius API to download the lyrics to each song by every artist on the list. After my script ran for about six hours I was left with the lyrics to 12,446 songs by 83 artists stored in a 105 MB JSON file. As a bit of an outsider to the world of country music, I was curious whether some of the preconceived notions I had about the genre were true.

Some pertinent questions:

  • Which artist mentions trucks in their songs most often?
  • Does an artist’s affinity for trucks predict any other features? Their gender for example? Or their favorite drink?
  • How has the genre’s vocabulary changed over time?
  • Of all the artists, whose language is most diverse? Whose is most repetitive?

You can find my code for this project on GitHub.

Miller focuses on popular country music but the lesson here could be applied to any collection of lyrics.

What’s your favorite genre or group?

Here’s a history/data question: Does popular (for some definition of popular) music change before revolutions? If so, in what way?

While you are at Miller’s site, browse around. There’s a number of interesting posts in addition to this one.

December 19, 2017

Was that Stevie Nicks or Tacotron 2.0? ML Singing in 2018

Filed under: Machine Learning,Music,Neural Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 7:15 pm

[S]amim @samim tweeted:

In 2018, machine learning based singing vocal synthesisers will go mainstream. It will transform the music industry beyond recognition.

With these two links:

Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions by Jonathan Shen, et al.

Abstract:

This paper describes Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture for speech synthesis directly from text. The system is composed of a recurrent sequence-to-sequence feature prediction network that maps character embeddings to mel-scale spectrograms, followed by a modified WaveNet model acting as a vocoder to synthesize timedomain waveforms from those spectrograms. Our model achieves a mean opinion score (MOS) of 4.53 comparable to a MOS of 4.58 for professionally recorded speech. To validate our design choices, we present ablation studies of key components of our system and evaluate the impact of using mel spectrograms as the input to WaveNet instead of linguistic, duration, and F0 features. We further demonstrate that using a compact acoustic intermediate representation enables significant simplification of the WaveNet architecture.

and,

Audio samples from “Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions”

Try the samples before dismissing the prediction of machine learning singing in 2018.

I have a different question:

What is in your test set for ML singing?

Among my top picks, Stevie Nicks, Janis Joplin, and of course, Grace Slick.

Practicing Vulnerability Hunting in Programming Languages for Music

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Music,Programming,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 5:38 pm

If you watched Natalie Silvanovich‘s presentation on mining the JavaScript standard for vulnerabilities, the tweet from Computer Science @CompSciFact pointing to Programming Languages Used for Music must have you drooling like one of Pavlov‘s dogs.

I count one hundred and forty-seven (147) languages, of varying degrees of popularity, none of which has gotten the security review of ECMA-262. (Michael Aranda wades through terminology/naming issues for ECMAScript vs. JavaScript at: What’s the difference between JavaScript and ECMAScript?.)

Good hunting!

November 20, 2017

SPARQL queries of Beatles recording sessions

Filed under: Music,Music Retrieval,RDF,SPARQL — Patrick Durusau @ 9:58 am

SPARQL queries of Beatles recording sessions – Who played what when? by Bob DuCharme.

From the post:

While listening to the song Dear Life on the new Beck album, I wondered who played the piano on the Beatles’ Martha My Dear. A web search found the website Beatles Bible, where the Martha My Dear page showed that it was Paul.

This was not a big surprise, but one pleasant surprise was how that page listed absolutely everyone who played on the song and what they played. For example, a musician named Leon Calvert played both trumpet and flugelhorn. The site’s Beatles’ Songs page links to pages for every song, listing everyone who played on them, with very few exceptions–for example, for giant Phil Spector productions like The Long and Winding Road, it does list all the instruments, but not who played them. On the other hand, for the orchestra on A Day in the Life, it lists the individual names of all 12 violin players, all 4 violists, and the other 25 or so musicians who joined the Fab Four for that.

An especially nice surprise on this website was how syntactically consistent the listings were, leading me to think “with some curl commands, python scripting, and some regular expressions, I could, dare I say it, convert all these listings to an RDF database of everyone who played on everything, then do some really cool SPARQL queries!”

So I did, and the RDF is available in the file BeatlesMusicians.ttl. The great part about having this is the ability to query across the songs to find out things such as how many different people played a given instrument on Beatles recordings or what songs a given person may have played on, regardless of instrument. In a pop music geek kind of way, it’s been kind of exciting to think that I could ask and answer questions about the Beatles that may have never been answered before.

Will the continuing popularity of the Beatles drive interest in SPARQL? Hard to say but DuCharme gives it a hard push in this post. It will certainly appeal to Beatles devotees.

Is it coincidence that DuCharme posted this on November 19, 2017, the same day as the reported death of Charles Mason? (cf. Helter Skelter)

There’s a logical extension to DuCharme’s RDF file, Charles Mason, the Mason family and music of that era.

Many foolish things were said about rock-n-rock in the ’60’s that are now being repeated about social media and terrorists. Same rant, same lack of evidence, same intolerance, same ineffectual measures against it. Not only can elders not learn from the past, they can’t wait to repeat it.

Be inventive! Learn from past mistakes so you can make new ones in the future!

May 24, 2017

Music Encoding Initiative

Filed under: Music,Music Retrieval,Text Encoding Initiative (TEI),Texts — Patrick Durusau @ 12:26 pm

Music Encoding Initiative

From the homepage:

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is an open-source effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI brings together specialists from various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are formalized in the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents expressed as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema. It is complemented by the MEI Guidelines, which provide detailed explanations of the components of the MEI model and best practices suggestions.

MEI is hosted by the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz. The Mainz Academy coordinates basic research in musicology through editorial long-term projects. This includes the complete works of from Brahms to Weber. Each of these (currently 15) projects has a duration of at least 15 years, and some (like Haydn, Händel and Gluck) are running since the 1950s. Therefore, the Academy is one of the most prominent institutions in the field of scholarly music editing. Several Academy projects are using MEI already (c.f. projects), and the Academy’s interest in MEI is a clear recommendation to use standards like MEI and TEI in such projects.

This website provides a Gentle Introduction to MEI, introductory training material, and information on projects and tools that utilize MEI. The latest MEI news, including information about additional opportunities for learning about MEI, is displayed on this page.

If you want to become an active MEI member, you’re invited to read more about the community and then join us on the MEI-L mailing list.

Any project that cites and relies upon Standard Music Description Language (SMDL), merits a mention on my blog!

If you are interested in encoding music or just complex encoding challenges in general, MEI merits your attention.

December 14, 2016

DeepBach: a Steerable Model for Bach chorales generation

Filed under: Machine Learning,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 8:56 pm

DeepBach: a Steerable Model for Bach chorales generation by Gaëtan Hadjeres and François Pachet.

Abstract:

The composition of polyphonic chorale music in the style of J.S Bach has represented a major challenge in automatic music composition over the last decades. The art of Bach chorales composition involves combining four-part harmony with characteristic rhythmic patterns and typical melodic movements to produce musical phrases which begin, evolve and end (cadences) in a harmonious way. To our knowledge, no model so far was able to solve all these problems simultaneously using an agnostic machine-learning approach. This paper introduces DeepBach, a statistical model aimed at modeling polyphonic music and specifically four parts, hymn-like pieces. We claim that, after being trained on the chorale harmonizations by Johann Sebastian Bach, our model is capable of generating highly convincing chorales in the style of Bach. We evaluate how indistinguishable our generated chorales are from existing Bach chorales with a listening test. The results corroborate our claim. A key strength of DeepBach is that it is agnostic and flexible. Users can constrain the generation by imposing some notes, rhythms or cadences in the generated score. This allows users to reharmonize user-defined melodies. DeepBach’s generation is fast, making it usable for interactive music composition applications. Several generation examples are provided and discussed from a musical point of view.

Take this with you on January 20, 2017 in case you tire of playing #DisruptJ20 Twitter Game (guessing XQuery/XPath definitions). Unlikely I know but anything can happen.

Deeply impressive work.

You can hear samples at:


http://www.flow-machines.com/deepbach-steerable-model-bach-choralesgeneration/

Download the code:

https://github.com/SonyCSL-Paris/DeepBach

Makes me curious about the composition of “like” works for composers who left smaller corpora.

June 22, 2016

The Infinite Jukebox

Filed under: Music — Patrick Durusau @ 8:04 pm

The Infinite Jukebox

From the FAQ:

  • What is this? For when your favorite song just isn’t long enough. This web app lets you upload a favorite MP3 and will then generate a never-ending and ever changing version of the song. It does what Infinite Gangnam Style did but for any song.
  • It never stops? – That’s right. It will play forever.
  • How does it work? – We use the Echo Nest analyzer to break the song into beats. We play the song beat by beat, but at every beat there’s a chance that we will jump to a different part of song that happens to sound very similar to the current beat. For beat similarity we look at pitch, timbre, loudness, duration and the position of the beat within a bar. There’s a nifty visualization that shows all the possible transitions that can occur at any beat.
  • Are there any ways to control the song? Yes – here are some keys:
    • [space] – Start and stop playing the song
    • [left arrow] – Decrement the current play velocity by one
    • [right arrow] – Increment the current play velocity by one
    • [Down arrow] – Sets the current play velocity to zero
    • [control] – freeze on the current beat
    • [shift] – bounce between the current beat and all of the similar sounding beats. These are the
      branch points.

    • ‘h’ – Bring it on home – toggles infinite mode off/on.
  • What do the colored blocks represent? Each block represents a beat in the song. The colors are related
    to the timbre of the music for that beat.

That should be enough to get you started. 😉

There’s a post on the Infinite Jukebox at Music Machinery.

I have mixed feelings about the Infinite Jukebox. While I appreciate its artistry and ability to make the familiar into something familiar, yet different, I also have a deep appreciation for the familiar.

Compare: While My Guitar Gently Weeps by the Beatles to Somebody to Love by Jefferson Airplane at the Infinite Jukebox.

The heart rending vocals of Grace Slick, on infinite play, become overwhelming.

I need to upload Lather. Strictly for others. I’m quite happy with the original.

Enjoy!

May 23, 2016

Alda (Music Programming Language) Update

Filed under: Clojure,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 4:33 pm

Alda: A Music Programming Language, Built in Clojure by David Yarwood.

Presentation by David at Clojure Remote.

From the description:

Inspired by other music/audio programming languages such as PPMCK, LilyPond and ChucK, Alda aims to be a powerful and flexible programming language for the musician who wants to easily compose and generate music on the fly, using only a text editor.

Clojure proved to be an ideal language for building a language like Alda, not only because of its wealth of excellent libraries like Instaparse and Overtone, but also because of its Lispy transparency and facility for crafting DSLs.

From the Github page:

Slack: Sign up to the universe of Clojure chat @ http://clojurians.net/, then join us on #alda

Reddit: Come join us in /r/alda, where you can discuss all things Alda and share your Alda scores!

Alda is looking for contributors! Step up!

April 12, 2016

LSTMetallica:…

Filed under: Machine Learning,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 7:30 pm

LSTMetallica: Generation drum tracks by learning the drum tracks of 60 Metallica songs by Keunwoo Choi.

From the post:

Word-RNN (LSTM) on Keras with wordified text representations of Metallica’s drumming midi files, which came from midiatabase.com.

  • Midi files of Metallica track comes from midiatabase.com.
  • LSTM model comes from Keras.
  • Read Midi files with python-midi.
  • Convert them to a text file (corpus) by my rules, which are
    • (Temporal) Quantisation
    • Simplification/Omitting some notes
    • ‘Word’ with binary numbers
  • Learn an LSTM model with the corpus and generate by prediction of words.
  • Words in a text file → midi according to the rules I used above.
  • Listen!

I mention this in part to inject some variety into the machine learning resources I have mentioned.

The failures of machine learning for recommendations can be amusing. For the most part when it works, they are rather dull.

Learning from drum tracks has the potential to combine drum tracks from different groups, resulting is something new.

May be fit for listening, maybe not. You won’t know without trying it.

Enjoy!

March 27, 2016

Kodály, String Quartet No. 1, 3rd movement

Filed under: Music,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 6:39 pm

From the webpage:

Scherzo (3rd movement) of Zoltán Kodály’s first string quartet, performed by the Alexander String Quartet, accompanied by a graphical score.

FAQ

Q: Where can I get this recording?
A: You complete album is available here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FPOOLPG

Q: Who are the performers?
A: The Alexander String Quartet comprises Zakarias Grafilo and Frederick Lifsitz, violins, Paul Yarbrough, viola, and Sandy Wilson, violoncello. You can learn more about the group here: http://asq4.com

Q: What do the colors mean?
A: Each pitch class (C, C-sharp, D, etc.) has its own color, arranged according to the “circle of fifths” so that changes in tonality can be seen; this system is described in more detail here: http://www.musanim.com/mam/pfifth.htm

In the first version of this video … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVhAmV… … the colors are applied to a conventional bar-graph score.

In the second version …http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHK5_7… … the “staff” is the 12 pitch classes, arranged in circle-of-fifths order.

Q: Could you please do a video of _______?
A: Please read this: http://www.musanim.com/requests/

If you want to see a data visualization with 26+ million views on YouTube, check out Stephen Malinowski’s YouTube channel.

Don’t miss Stephen Malinowski’s website. Select “site map” for a better idea of what you will find at the site.

March 10, 2016

1,000 Hours of Early Jazz

Filed under: History,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 8:28 pm

1,000 Hours of Early Jazz Recordings Now Online: Archive Features Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington & Much More

From the post:

David W. Niven spent his life amassing a vast record collection, all dedicated to the sounds of Early Jazz. As a kid during the 1920s, he started buying jazz records with money earned from his paper route. By World War II, Niven, now a college student, had thousands of LPs. “All the big names of jazz, along with lesser legends, were included,” Niven later said, and “I found myself with a first class treasure of early jazz music.” Louis Armstrong, Bix Beiderbecke, Duke Ellington, and much, much more.

For the sake of his children, Niven started transferring his record collection to cassette tapes during the 1980s and prefacing them with audio commentaries that offer background information on each recording. Now, years after his death (1991), his collection of “Early Jazz Legends” has made its way to the web, thanks to archivist Kevin J. Powers. If you head over to Archive.org, you can stream/download digitized versions of 650 cassette tapes, featuring over 1,000 hours of early jazz music. There’s also scans of liner cards for each recording.

Every recitation of history is incomplete but some are more incomplete than others.

Imagine trying to create a recitation about the mid to late 1960’s without examples of the music, posters, incense, body counts, napalm, etc.

Here’s one slice of the early 20th century for your listening enjoyment.

December 26, 2015

Virtual Kalimba

Filed under: Audio,Music,Web Applications,Web Browser — Patrick Durusau @ 11:12 am

Virtual Kalimba

virtual-kalimba

Visit the site for keyboard shortcuts, tips & tricks, and interactive production of sound!

The website is an experiment in Web Audio by Middle Ear Media.

The Web Audio Tutorials page at Middle Ear Media has eight (8) tutorials on Web Audio.

Demo apps:

Apps are everywhere. While native mobile apps get a lot of attention, web apps have become much more powerful in recent years. Hopefully you can find something here that will stimulate you or improve the quality of your life in some way.

Web Audio Loop Mixer

Web Audio Loop Mixer is a Web Audio experiment created with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and the Web Audio API. This web app is a stand alone loop mixer with effects. It allows up to four audio loops to be boosted, attenuated, equalized, panned, muted, and effected by delay or distortion in the browser.

Virtual Kalimba

Virtual Kalimba is a Web Audio experiment created with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It uses the Web Audio API to recreate a Kalimba, also known as an Mbira or Thumb Piano. This is a traditional African instrument that belongs to the Lamellophone family of musical instruments.

Virtual Hang

Virtual Hang is a Web Audio experiment created with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. It uses the Web Audio API to recreate a Hang, a steel hand pan instrument. The Hang is an amazing musical instrument developed by Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer in Bern, Switzerland.

War Machine

War Machine is a Web Audio experiment created with HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. The App uses the Web Audio API to create a sample pad interface reminiscent of an Akai MPC. The purpose of War Machine is not to promote violence, but rather to create a safe (victimless) environment for the release of excess aggression.

Channel Strip

Channel Strip is a Web Audio experiment created with HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and the Web Audio API. This web app is a stand alone audio channel strip that allows an audio signal to be boosted, attenuated, equalized, panned, compressed and muted in the browser. The audio source is derived from user media via file select input.

Task Managment

A fast loading Web App for managing tasks online. This App offers functions such as editable list items, removable list items, and it uses localStorage to save your information in your own browser.

On War Machine, the top row, third pad from the left comes the closest to an actual gunshot sound.

Works real well with the chorus from Anders Osborne’s Five Bullets:

Boom , boom, boom, that American sound
Teenage kids on a naked ground
Boom, boom, boom, that American sound
Five bullets in Pigeon Town

For more details on Anders Osborne, including lyrics and tour dates, see: Ya Ya Nation.

I first saw this in a tweet by Chris Ford.

November 5, 2015

Hopping on the Deep Learning Bandwagon

Filed under: Classification,Deep Learning,Machine Learning,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 3:51 pm

Hopping on the Deep Learning Bandwagon by Yanir Seroussi.

From the post:

I’ve been meaning to get into deep learning for the last few years. Now, the stars having finally aligned and I have the time and motivation to work on a small project that will hopefully improve my understanding of the field. This is the first in a series of posts that will document my progress on this project.

As mentioned in a previous post on getting started as a data scientist, I believe that the best way of becoming proficient at solving data science problems is by getting your hands dirty. Despite being familiar with high-level terminology and having some understanding of how it all works, I don’t have any practical experience applying deep learning. The purpose of this project is to fix this experience gap by working on a real problem.

The problem: Inferring genre from album covers

Deep learning has been very successful at image classification. Therefore, it makes sense to work on an image classification problem for this project. Rather than using an existing dataset, I decided to make things a bit more interesting by building my own dataset. Over the last year, I’ve been running BCRecommender – a recommendation system for Bandcamp music. I’ve noticed that album covers vary by genre, though it’s hard to quantify exactly how they vary. So the question I’ll be trying to answer with this project is how accurately can genre be inferred from Bandcamp album covers?

As the goal of this project is to learn about deep learning rather than make a novel contribution, I didn’t do a comprehensive search to see whether this problem has been addressed before. However, I did find a recent post by Alexandre Passant that describes his use of Clarifai’s API to tag the content of Spotify album covers (identifying elements such as men, night, dark, etc.), and then using these tags to infer the album’s genre. Another related project is Karayev et al.’s Recognizing image style paper, in which the authors classified datasets of images from Flickr and Wikipedia by style and art genre, respectively. In all these cases, the results are pretty good, supporting my intuition that the genre inference task is feasible.

Yanir continues this adventure into deep learning with: Learning About Deep Learning Through Album Cover Classification. And you will want to look over his list of Deep Learning Resources.

Yanir’s observation that the goal of the project was “…to learn about deep learning rather than make a novel contribution…” is an important one.

The techniques and lessons you learn may be known to others but they will be new to you.

October 15, 2015

Musical Genres Classified Using the Entropy of MIDI Files

Filed under: Music,Music Retrieval,Shannon — Patrick Durusau @ 1:35 pm

Musical Genres Classified Using the Entropy of MIDI Files (Emerging Technology from the arXiv, October 15, 2015)

Music analysis

Communication is the process of reproducing a message created in one point space at another point in space. It has been studied in depth by numerous scientists and engineers but it is the mathematical treatment of communication that has had the most profound influence.

To mathematicians, the details of a message are of no concern. All that matters is that the message can be thought of as an ordered set of symbols. Mathematicians have long known that this set is governed by fundamental laws first outlined by Claude Shannon in his mathematical theory of communication.

Shannon’s work revolutionized the way engineers think about communication but it has far-reaching consequences in other areas, too. Language involves the transmission of information from one individual to another and information theory provides a window through which to study and understand its nature. In computing, data is transmitted from one location to another and information theory provides the theoretical bedrock that allows this to be done most efficiently. And in biology, reproduction can be thought of as the transmission of genetic information from one generation to the next.

Music too can be thought of as the transmission of information from one location to another, but scientists have had much less success in using information theory to characterize music and study its nature.

Today, that changes thanks to the work of Gerardo Febres and Klaus Jaffé at Simon Bolivar University in Venezuela. These guys have found a way to use information theory to tease apart the nature of certain types of music and to automatically classify different musical genres, a famously difficult task in computer science.

One reason why music is so hard to study is that it does not easily translate into an ordered set of symbols. Music often consists of many instruments playing different notes at the same time. Each of these can have various qualities of timbre, loudness, and so on.

Music viewed by its Entropy content: A novel window for comparative analysis by Gerardo Febres and Klaus Jaffe.

Abstract:

Texts of polyphonic music MIDI files were analyzed using the set of symbols that produced the Fundamental Scale (a set of symbols leading to the Minimal Entropy Description). We created a space to represent music pieces by developing: (a) a method to adjust a description from its original scale of observation to a general scale, (b) the concept of higher order entropy as the entropy associated to the deviations of a frequency ranked symbol profile from a perfect Zipf profile. We called this diversity index the “2nd Order Entropy”. Applying these methods to a variety of musical pieces showed how the space “symbolic specific diversity-entropy – 2nd order entropy” captures some of the essence of music types, styles, composers and genres. Some clustering around each musical category is shown. We also observed the historic trajectory of music across this space, from medieval to contemporary academic music. We show that description of musical structures using entropy allows to characterize traditional and popular expressions of music. These classification techniques promise to be useful in other disciplines for pattern recognition, machine learning, and automated experimental design for example.

The process simplifies the data stream, much like you choose which subjects you want to talk about in a topic map.

Purists will object but realize that objection is because they have chosen a different (and much more complex) set of subjects to talk about in the analysis of music.

The important point is to realize we are always choosing different degrees of granularity of subjects and their identifications, for some specific purpose. Change that purpose and the degree of granularity will change.

September 8, 2015

Alda: A Manifesto and Gentle Introduction

Filed under: Clojure,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 11:02 am

Alda: A Manifesto and Gentle Introduction by Dave Yarwood.

From the webpage:

What is Alda?

2015-08-18-alda

Alda’s ambition is to be a powerful and flexible music programming language that can be used to create music in a variety of genres by typing some code into a text editor and running a program that compiles the code and turns it into sound. I’ve put a lot of thought into making the syntax as intuitive and beginner-friendly as possible. In fact, one of the goals of Alda is to be simple for someone with little-to-no programming experience to pick up and start using. Alda’s tagline, a music programming language for musicians, conveys its goal of being useful to non-programmers.

But while its syntax aims to be as simple as possible, Alda will also be extensive in scope, offering composers a canvas with creative possibilities as close to unlimited as it can muster. I’m about to ramble a little about the inspiring creative potential that audio programming languages can bring to the table; it is my hope that Alda will embody much of this potential.

At the time of writing, Alda can be used to create MIDI scores, using any instrument available in the General MIDI sound set. In the near future, Alda’s scope will be expanded to include sounds synthesized from basic waveforms, samples loaded from sound files, and perhaps other forms of synthesis. I’m envisioning a world where programmers and non-programmers alike can create all sorts of music, from classical to chiptune to experimental soundscapes, using only a text editor and the Alda executable.

In this blog post, I will walk you through the steps of setting up Alda and writing some basic scores.

Whether you want to create new compositions or be able to “hear” what you can read in manuscript form, this looks like an exciting project.

A couple of resources if you are interested in historical material:

The Morgan Library &amp: Museum’s Music Manuscripts Online, which as works by J. S. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Fauré, Haydn, Liszt, Mahler, Massenet, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Puccini, Schubert, and Schumann, and others.

Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM).

The sources archived include all the currently known fragmentary sources of polyphony up to 1550 in the UK (almost all of these are available for study through this website); all the ‘complete’ manuscripts in the UK; a small number of important representative manuscripts from continental Europe; a significant portion of fragments from 1300-1450 from Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland and Spain. Such a collection of images, created under strict protocols to ensure parity across such a varied collection, has never before been possible, and represents an extraordinary resource for study of the repertory as a whole. Although these manuscripts have been widely studied since their gradual discovery by scholars at various times over the past century, dealing with the repertory as a whole has been hampered by the very wide geographical spread of the manuscripts and the limitations of microfilm or older b/w photography. Fragments are far more numerous than complete sources, but most of them are the sole remaining representatives of lost manuscripts. Some are barely legible and hard to place and interpret. They amount to a rich but widely scattered resource that has been relatively neglected, partly because of difficulty of access, legibility and comparison of materials that are vulnerable to damage and loss.

Being aware, of course, that music notation has evolved over the years and capturing medieval works will require mastery of their notations.

A mapping from any form of medieval notation to Alda I am sure would be of great interest.

August 9, 2015

Birth of Music Visualization (Apr, 1924)

Filed under: Music,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 10:25 am

Birth of Music Visualization (Apr, 1924)

xlg_light_show_0

The date’s correct. Article in Popular Mechanics, April 1924.

From the article:

The clavilux has three manuals and a triple light chamber, corresponding respectively to the keyboard and wind chest of the pipe organ. Disk keys appear on the manual, moving to and from the operator and playing color and form almost as the pipe organ plays sound.

There are 100 positions for each key, making possible almost infinite combinations of color and form. The “music,” or notation, is printed in figures upon a five-lined staff, three staves joined, as treble and bass clefs are joined for piano, to provide a “clef” for each of the three manuals. A color chord is represented by three figures as, for example, “40-35-60″; and movement of the prescribed keys to the designated positions on the numbered scale of the keyboard produces the desired figure.

The artist sits at the keyboard with the notation book before him. He releases the light by means of switches. By playing upon the keys he projects it upon the screen, molds it into form, makes the form move and change in rhythm, introduces texture and depth, and finally injects color of perfect purity in any degree of intensity.

When you have the time, check out the archives of Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics for that matter at Google Books.

I don’t know if a topic map of the “hands-on” projects from those zines would have a market or not. The zines covering that sort of thing have died, or at least that is my impression.

Modern equivalents to Popular Mechanics/Electronics that you can point out?

July 28, 2015

The next Web standard could be music notation

Filed under: Music — Patrick Durusau @ 6:55 pm

The next Web standard could be music notation by Peter Kirn.

From the post:

The role of the music score is an important one, as a lingua franca – it puts musical information in a format a lot of people can read. And it does that by adhering to standards.

Now with computers, phones, and tablets all over the planet, can music notation adapt?

A new group is working on bringing digital notation as a standard to the Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) – yes, the folks who bring you other Web standards – formed what they’re describing as a “community group” to work on notation.

That doesn’t mean your next Chrome build will give you lead sheets. W3C are hosting, not endorsing the project – not yet. And there’s a lot of work to be done. But many of the necessary players are onboard, which could mean some musically useful progress.

The news arrived in my inbox by way of Hamburg-based Steinberg. That’s no surprise; we knew back in 2013 that the core team behind Sibelius had arrived at Steinberg after a reorganization at Avid pushed them out of the company they original started.

The other big player in the group is MakeMusic, developers of Finale. And they’re not mincing words: they’re transferring the ownership of the MusicXML interchange format to the new, open group:
MakeMusic Transfers MusicXML Development to W3C [musicxml.com]

The next step: make notation work on the Web. Sibelius were, while not the first to put notation on the Web, the first to popularize online sharing as a headline feature in a mainstream notation tool. Sibelius even had a platform for sharing and selling scores, complete with music playback. But that was dependent on a proprietary plug-in – now, the browser is finally catching up, and we can do all of the things Scorch does right in browser.

So, it’s time for an open standard. And the basic foundation already exists. The new W3C Music Notation Community Group promises to “maintain and update” two existing standards – MusicXML and the awkwardly-acronym’ed SMuFL (Standard Music Font Layout). Smuffle sounds like a Muppet from Sesame Street, but okay.

For the W3C group: https://www.w3.org/community/music-notation/.

Music notation has a long history across cultures. It will be interesting to see what subset of music notation is captured by this effort.

July 24, 2015

Programming Languages Used for Music

Filed under: Music,Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 9:01 pm

Programming Languages Used for Music by Tim Thompson.

From the history page:

The PLUM (Programming Languages Used for Music) list is maintained as a service for those who, like me, are interested in programming languages that are used for a musical purpose. The initial content was based on a list that Carter Scholz compiled and posted to netnews in 1991.

There are a wide variety of languages used for music. Some are conventional programming languages that have been enhanced with libraries and environments for use in musical applications. Others are specialized languages developed explicitly for music.

The focus of entries in this list is on the languages, and not on particular applications. In other words, a musical application written in a particular programming language does not immediately qualify for inclusion in the list, unless the application is specifically intended to enhance the use of that language for musical development by other programmers.

Special thanks go to people who have provided significant comments and information for this list: Bill Schottstaedt, Dave Phillips, and Carter Scholz.

Corrections to existing entries and suggestions for improving the list should be mailed to the PLUM maintainer:

Tim Thompson
Email: me@timthompson.com
Home Page: http://timthompson.com

If you are experimenting with Clojure and music, these prior efforts may be inspirational.

Enjoy!

July 9, 2015

Royal Albert Hall – Performance History & Archive

Filed under: History,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 3:19 pm

Royal Albert Hall – Performance History & Archive

From the webpage:

THE ROYAL ALBERT HALL’S HISTORY IS NOW AT YOUR FINGERTIPS!

Search our Performance Database to find out about your favourite artist or explore 30,000+ events from 1871 to last night.

Search the Archive to discover items in the Hall’s unique archive collections which chart the history of the building, organisation and events.

Another extraordinary resource from the UK. It is almost enough to make you forget that David Cameron is also a product of the UK.

June 30, 2015

Perceptual feature-based song genre classification using RANSAC [Published?]

Filed under: Classification,Classifier,Music,Music Retrieval — Patrick Durusau @ 1:59 pm

Perceptual feature-based song genre classification using RANSAC by Arijit Ghosal; Rudrasis Chakraborty; Bibhas Chandra Dhara; Sanjoy Kumar Saha. International Journal of Computational Intelligence Studies (IJCISTUDIES), Vol. 4, No. 1, 2015.

Abstract:

In the context of a content-based music retrieval system or archiving digital audio data, genre-based classification of song may serve as a fundamental step. In the earlier attempts, researchers have described the song content by a combination of different types of features. Such features include various frequency and time domain descriptors depicting the signal aspects. Perceptual aspects also have been combined along with. A listener perceives a song mostly in terms of its tempo (rhythm), periodicity, pitch and their variation and based on those recognises the genre of the song. Motivated by this observation, in this work, instead of dealing with wide range of features we have focused only on the perceptual aspect like melody and rhythm. In order to do so audio content is described based on pitch, tempo, amplitude variation pattern and periodicity. Dimensionality of descriptor vector is reduced and finally, random sample and consensus (RANSAC) is used as the classifier. Experimental result indicates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

A new approach to classification of music, but that’s all I can say since the content is behind a pay-wall.

One way to increase the accessibility of texts would be for tenure committees to not consider publications as “published” until they are freely available for the author’s webpage.

That one change could encourage authors to press for the right to post their own materials and to follow through with posting them as soon as possible.

Feel free to forward this post to members of your local tenure committee.

June 28, 2015

New York Philharmonic Performance History

Filed under: Data,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 2:31 pm

New York Philharmonic Performance History

From the post:

The New York Philharmonic played its first concert on December 7, 1842. Since then, it has merged with the New York Symphony, the New/National Symphony, and had a long-running summer season at New York’s Lewisohn Stadium. This Performance History database documents all known concerts of all of these organizations, amounting to more than 20,000 performances. The New York Philharmonic Leon Levy Digital Archives provides an additional interface for searching printed programs alongside other digitized items such as marked music scores, marked orchestral parts, business records, and photos.

In an effort to make this data available for study, analysis, and reuse, the New York Philharmonic joins organizations like The Tate and the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian National Design Museum in making its own contribution to the Open Data movement.

The metadata here is released under the Creative Commons Public Domain CC0 licence. Please see the enclosed LICENCE file for more detail.

The data:

Field Description
General Info: Info that applies to entire program
id GUID (To view program: archives.nyphil.org/index.php/artifact/GUID/fullview)
ProgramID Local NYP ID
Orchestra Full orchestra name Learn more…
Season Defined as Sep 1 – Aug 31, displayed “1842-43”
Concert Info: Repeated for each individual performance within a program
eventType See term definitions
Location Geographic location of concert (Countries are identified by their current name. For example, even though the orchestra played in Czechoslovakia, it is now identified in the data as the Czech Republic)
Venue Name of hall, theater, or building where the concert took place
Date Full ISO date used, but ignore TIME part (1842-12-07T05:00:00Z = Dec. 7, 1842)
Time Actual time of concert, e.g. “8:00PM”
Works Info: the fields below are repeated for each work performed on a program. By matching the index number of each field, you can tell which soloist(s) and conductor(s) performed a specific work on each of the concerts listed above.
worksConductorName Last name, first name
worksComposerTitle Composer Last name, first / TITLE (NYP short titles used)
worksSoloistName Last name, first name (if multiple soloists on a single work, delimited by semicolon)
worksSoloistInstrument Last name, first name (if multiple soloists on a single work, delimited by semicolon)
worksSoloistRole “S” means “Soloist”; “A” means “Assisting Artist” (if multiple soloists on a single work, delimited by semicolon)

A great starting place for a topic map for performances of the New York Philharmonic or for combination with topic maps for composers or soloists.

I first saw this in a tweet by Anna Kijas.

May 21, 2015

Machine-Learning Algorithm Mines Rap Lyrics, Then Writes Its Own

Filed under: Humor,Machine Learning,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 2:01 pm

Machine-Learning Algorithm Mines Rap Lyrics, Then Writes Its Own

From the post:

The ancient skill of creating and performing spoken rhyme is thriving today because of the inexorable rise in the popularity of rapping. This art form is distinct from ordinary spoken poetry because it is performed to a beat, often with background music.

And the performers have excelled. Adam Bradley, a professor of English at the University of Colorado has described it in glowing terms. Rapping, he says, crafts “intricate structures of sound and rhyme, creating some of the most scrupulously formal poetry composed today.”

The highly structured nature of rap makes it particularly amenable to computer analysis. And that raises an interesting question: if computers can analyze rap lyrics, can they also generate them?

Today, we get an affirmative answer thanks to the work of Eric Malmi at the University of Aalto in Finland and few pals. These guys have trained a machine-learning algorithm to recognize the salient features of a few lines of rap and then choose another line that rhymes in the same way on the same topic. The result is an algorithm that produces rap lyrics that rival human-generated ones for their complexity of rhyme.

The review is a fun read but I rather like the original paper title as well: DopeLearning: A Computational Approach to Rap Lyrics Generation by Eric Malmi, Pyry Takala, Hannu Toivonen, Tapani Raiko, Aristides Gionis.

Abstract:

Writing rap lyrics requires both creativity, to construct a meaningful and an interesting story, and lyrical skills, to produce complex rhyme patterns, which are the cornerstone of a good flow. We present a method for capturing both of these aspects. Our approach is based on two machine-learning techniques: the RankSVM algorithm, and a deep neural network model with a novel structure. For the problem of distinguishing the real next line from a randomly selected one, we achieve an 82 % accuracy. We employ the resulting prediction method for creating new rap lyrics by combining lines from existing songs. In terms of quantitative rhyme density, the produced lyrics outperform best human rappers by 21 %. The results highlight the benefit of our rhyme density metric and our innovative predictor of next lines.

You should also visit BattleBot (a rap engine):

BattleBot is a rap engine which allows you to “spit” any line that comes to your mind after which it will respond to you with a selection of rhyming lines found among 0.5 million lines from existing rap songs. The engine is based on a slightly improved version of the Raplyzer algorithm and the eSpeak speech synthesizer.

You can try out BattleBot simply by hitting “Spit” or “Random”. The latter will randomly pick a line among the whole database of lines and find the rhyming lines for that. The underlined part shows approximately the rhyming part of a result. To understand better, why it’s considered as a rhyme, you can click on the result, see the phonetic transcriptions of your line and the result, and look for matching vowel sequences starting from the end.

BTW, the MIT review concludes with:

What’s more, this and other raps generated by DeepBeat have a rhyming density significantly higher than any human rapper. “DeepBeat outperforms the top human rappers by 21% in terms of length and frequency of the rhymes in the produced lyrics,” they point out.

I can’t help but wonder when DeepBeat is going to hit the charts! 😉

May 12, 2015

Creative computing with Clojure

Filed under: Art,Clojure,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 3:56 pm

Creative computing with Clojure by Carin Meier.

From the post:

Clojure is gaining traction and popularity as a programming language. Both enterprises and startups are adopting this functional language because of the simplicity, elegance, and power that it brings to their business. The language originated on the JVM, but has since spread to run on the CLR and Node.js, including web browsers and mobile devices. With this spread of practical innovation, there has been another delightful development: a groundswell of people making art with Clojure.

Carin covers music, visual arts, dance, and animation, with pointers to videos and projects.

If you are looking for a challenging but enjoyable escape from the daily news, this is a good place to start!

April 28, 2015

Markov Composer

Filed under: Music — Patrick Durusau @ 6:27 pm

Markov Composer – Using machine learning and a Markov chain to compose music by Andrej Budinčević.

From the post:

In the following article, I’ll present some of the research I’ve been working on lately. Algorithms, or algorithmic composition, have been used to compose music for centuries. For example, Western punctus contra punctum can be sometimes reduced to algorithmic determinacy. Then, why not use fast-learning computers capable of billions of calculations per second to do what they do best, to follow algorithms? In this article, I’m going to do just that, using machine learning and a second order Markov chain.

If you like exploring music with a computer, Andrej’s post will be a real treat!

Enjoy!

MarkovComposer (GitHub)

I first saw this in a tweet by Debasish Ghosh.

April 17, 2015

Recommending music on Spotify with deep learning

Filed under: Deep Learning,Music,Recommendation — Patrick Durusau @ 2:37 pm

Recommending music on Spotify with deep learning by Sander Dieleman.

From the post:

This summer, I’m interning at Spotify in New York City, where I’m working on content-based music recommendation using convolutional neural networks. In this post, I’ll explain my approach and show some preliminary results.

Overview

This is going to be a long post, so here’s an overview of the different sections. If you want to skip ahead, just click the section title to go there.

If you are interested in the details of deep learning and recommendation for music, you have arrived at the right place!

Walking through Sander’s post will take some time but it will repay your efforts handsomely.

Not to mention Spotify having the potential to broaden your musical horizons!

I first saw this in a tweet by Mica McPeeters.

March 14, 2015

Mapping Your Music Collection [Seeing What You Expect To See]

Filed under: Audio,Machine Learning,Music,Python,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 4:11 pm

Mapping Your Music Collection by Christian Peccei.

From the post:

In this article we’ll explore a neat way of visualizing your MP3 music collection. The end result will be a hexagonal map of all your songs, with similar sounding tracks located next to each other. The color of different regions corresponds to different genres of music (e.g. classical, hip hop, hard rock). As an example, here’s a map of three albums from my music collection: Paganini’s Violin Caprices, Eminem’s The Eminem Show, and Coldplay’s X&Y.

smallmap

To make things more interesting (and in some cases simpler), I imposed some constraints. First, the solution should not rely on any pre-existing ID3 tags (e.g. Arist, Genre) in the MP3 files—only the statistical properties of the sound should be used to calculate the similarity of songs. A lot of my MP3 files are poorly tagged anyways, and I wanted to keep the solution applicable to any music collection no matter how bad its metadata. Second, no other external information should be used to create the visualization—the only required inputs are the user’s set of MP3 files. It is possible to improve the quality of the solution by leveraging a large database of songs which have already been tagged with a specific genre, but for simplicity I wanted to keep this solution completely standalone. And lastly, although digital music comes in many formats (MP3, WMA, M4A, OGG, etc.) to keep things simple I just focused on MP3 files. The algorithm developed here should work fine for any other format as long as it can be extracted into a WAV file.

Creating the music map is an interesting exercise. It involves audio processing, machine learning, and visualization techniques.

It would take longer than a weekend to complete this project with a sizable music collection but it would be a great deal of fun!

Great way to become familiar with several Python libraries.

BTW, when I saw Coldplay, I thought of Coal Chamber by mistake. Not exactly the same subject. 😉

I first saw this in a tweet by Kirk Borne.

March 1, 2015

Clojure and Overtone Driving Minecraft

Filed under: Clojure,Games,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 4:53 pm

Clojure and Overtone Driving Minecraft by Joseph Wilk.

From the post:

Using Clojure we create interesting 3D shapes in Minecraft to the beat of music generated from Overtone.

We achieve this by embedding a Clojure REPL inside a Java Minecraft server which loads Overtone and connects to an external Supercollider instance (What Overtone uses for sound).

Speaking of functional programming, you may find this useful.

The graphics and music are impressive!

February 7, 2015

100 pieces of flute music

Filed under: Design,Graphics,Music,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 3:28 pm

100 pieces of flute music – A quantified self project where music and design come together by Erika von Kelsch.

From the post:

flute-image1-680x490

(image: The final infographic | Erika von Kelsch)

The premise of the project was to organize 100 pieces of data into a static print piece. At least 7 metadata categories were to be included within the infographic, as well as a minimum of 3 overall data rollups. I chose 100 pieces of flute music that I have played that have been in my performance repertoire. Music was a potential career path for me, and the people and experiences I had through music influence how I view and explore the world around me to this day. The way I approach design is also influenced by what I learned from studying music, including the technical aspects of both flute and theory, as well as the emotional facets of performance. I decided to use this project as a vehicle to document this experience.

Not only is this a great visualization but the documentation of the design process is very impressive!

Have you ever attempted to document your design process during a project? That is what actually happened as opposed to what “must have happended” in the design process?

January 13, 2015

Who’s like Tatum?

Filed under: D3,Graphs,Music — Patrick Durusau @ 4:15 pm

Who’s like Tatum? by Peter Cook.

art-tatum

Only a small part of the jazz musical universe that awaits you at “Who’s Like Tatum?

The description at the site reads:

Who’s like Tatum?

Art Tatum was one of the greatest jazz pianists ever. His extraordinary command of the piano was legendary and was rarely surpassed.

This is a network generated from Last.fm‘s similar artist data. Using Art Tatum as a starting point, I’ve recursively gathered similar artists.

The visualisation reveals some interesting clusters. To the bottom-right of Art Tatum is a cluster of be-bop musicians including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk.

Meanwhile to the top-left of Tatum is a cluster of swing bands/musicians featuring the likes of Count Basie, Benny Goodman and a couple of Tatum’s contemporary pianists Fats Waller and Teddy Wilson. Not surprisingly we see Duke Ellington spanning the gap between these swing and be-bop musicians.

If we work counter-clockwise we can observe clusters of vocalists (e.g. Mel Tormé and Anita O’Day), country artists (e.g. Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn) and blues artists (e.g. Son House and T-Bone Walker).

It’s interesting to spot artists who span different genres such as Big Joe Turner who has links to both swing and blues artists. Might this help explain his early involvement in rock and roll?

Do explore the network yourself and see what insights you can unearth. (Can’t read the labels? Use your browser’s zoom controls!)

Designed and developed by Peter Cook. Data from the Last.fm API enquired with pylast. Network layout using D3.

At the site, mousing over the name of an artist in the description pops up their label in the graph.

As interesting as such graphs can be, what I always wonder about is the measure used for “similarity?” Or were multiple dimensions used to measure similarity?

I can enjoy and explore such a presentation but I can’t engage in a discussion with the author or anyone else about how similar or dissimilar any artist was or along what dimensions. It isn’t that those subjects are missing, but they are unrepresented so there is no place to record my input.

One of the advantages of topic maps being that you can choose which subjects you will represent and which ones you want. Which of course means anyone following you in the same topic map can add the subjects they want to discuss as well.

For a graph such as this one, represented as a topic map, I could add subjects to represent the base(s) for similarity and comments by others on the similarity or lack thereof of particular artists. Other subjects?

Or to put it more generally, how do you merge different graphs?

December 23, 2014

Sam Aaron – Cognicast Episode 069

Filed under: Functional Programming,Music,Programming,Sound — Patrick Durusau @ 5:04 pm

067-sam-aaron

From the webpage:

In this episode, we talk to Sam Aaron, programmer, educator and musician.

Our Guest, Sam Aaron

Music

Sam is sharing original music he composed using Sonic Pi. To start the show, he chose “Time Machine”. To end the show, he chose “Goodbyes”.

Topics

Subscribing to The Cognicast

The show is available on iTunes! You can also subscribe to the podcast using our podcast feed.

A great perspective on getting people interested in coding, which should be transferable to topic maps. Yes?

Although, I must admit I almost raised my hand when Aaron asked “…who has had fun with sorting?” Well, some people have different interests. 😉

A very enjoyable podcast! I will have to look at prior episodes to see what else I have missed!

PS: What would it take to make the topic map equivalent of Sonic Pi? Taking note of Aaron’s comments on “friction.”

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