Read the first part of Byrd, D., & Crawford, T. (2002). Problems of Music Information Retrieval in the Real World. Information Processing and Management 38, pp. 249-272. Read just up to Causes: Why is Music IR Hard?, in the middle of p. 13, and think about the following questions (there'll be nothing to turn in). (1) Does it talk about music the way you think of it, or does it say surprising things? Does its viewpoint make sense for music you're familiar with? If it surprises you, or its views don't make sense for some music, be prepared to say so in class. (2) This article is now over five years old. Does it seem up-to-date anyway, or does it seem somehow behind the times? For example, does it focus on certain kinds of music-IR tasks and not others? Also read this recent article from The New York Times, Music of the Hemispheres. According to the NY Times article, Dr. Levitin considers timbre vitally important to the powerful effect pop music has on people, as well as making it possible to recognize a song after hearing only a tiny bit of it. (3) Do you agree? Why or why not? Be prepared to cite at least one example to support your position. If you agree, do you think the same thing applies to other kinds of music? Be prepared to cite at least one example.

(a) Read the rest of the Byrd & Crawford paper. In light of both Levitin's comments and our discussion the other day of Byrd & Crawford, how (if at all) would you change Byrd & Crawford's claims about why music IR is hard? Also, I said on Wednesday that I thought the NY Times article uses the word "timbre" (or quotes Levitin as using it) in a very peculiar way. Consider, for example, what it seems to mean when he's talking about Elton John's piano sound and for the original Beatles audition tape. Does it mean the same thing in both cases, or the usual meaning? Be prepared to comment. You might try to write down (for discussion, not to turn in) a definition of the word as it's used in one or both contexts.

Work through this first tutorial on R. NOTE: this version is out of date; instead, please use the current version, linked under 1/23.

HOMEWORK #1: Choose a piece of music that you think is really interesting: preferably also something you like a lot, but it's more important that you find it interesting. Here are detailed instructions. Note carefully when your contribution is due: Monday!

Before class, try to run some of the R Example Programs, especially ChromaticWanderings.r and RGLSphereDemo.r. Instructions for running R programs appear in the "first tutorial on R", from Monday. You might also find the R Programming & Digital Audio slides (on my Teaching home page) helpful. Note that for ChromaticWanderings -- actually, for nearly all the example programs except RGLSphereDemo -- you'll need to play sounds, which on a Mac requires a bit of extra setup; see How to Play Sounds with tuneR on OS X Macs. .

[In my opinion, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. demonstrated that a non-violent approach can help solve very difficult problems in the world, problems like civil rights for blacks in the United States of the 1950's and 60's, just as -- a generation earlier -- Mahatma Gandi demonstrated the same thing with respect to self-determination for the people of India. Their examples are sadly and dangerously neglected these days. You might want to listen to Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech (http://youtube.com/watch?v=PbUtL_0vAJk), or read his less well-known "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" (http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html). End of sermon.]

Here's a new, improved version of my first tutorial on R.

HOMEWORK #2. I545 R Demo and Assignment #1 describes some of what I did (and will do before now) in class, and gives two or three exercises for you to do on your own, to be turned in via e-mail before class. [FLASH: this assignment is not due until FRIDAY! See my e-mail of Monday noonish for the reasons.]

Read the Abstract and Chapters 1 ("Introduction", mostly background on musical concepts) and 2, ("Characteristics of the Music Language") of Orio, Nicola (2006). Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review. Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval 1,1; available at http://www.nowpublishers.com/ir/ . NB: The author is Italian, and his English isn't always correct, but it's not too hard to understand. What do you think of Orio's list of "dimensions" of music? How does his concept of the information in music compare to Byrd & Crawford's? Be prepared to discuss.

Details TBA

Details TBA

HOMEWORK #3: do another R programming exercise based on the Chromatic Wanderings program. Be prepared to discuss the question about giving the program's output a feeling of rhythm -- or other ways to improve its "melodies". What does all this have to do with representing musical information?

Please bring headphones today.

What are your own goals for this class? Write down what you'd like to know and/or be able to do after taking this class that you can't do now. Please be as specific as possible! You might want to describe what you want to learn in general, then give an example or two. I suggest you look at the syllabus on the class webpage before you write. this. I won't grade it; as I said in class, this is just help me decide what to do for the rest of the semester.

Also, read and be prepared to discuss Wiggins, Geraint; Miranda, Eduardo; Smaill, Alan; & Harris, Mitch (1993). A Framework for the Evaluation of Music Representation Systems. Computer Music Journal 17(3), pp. 31-42.

There's no assignment for today.

HOMEWORK #4: Part 1: Do this hands-on MIDI assignment. It shouldn't take too long, but it requires some hardware you may not have at home! Part 2: Do this assignment to write an R program to look at a text version of a MIDI file and see how common each attack time in a measure is.

There's no assignment for today.

Before class today, look at some of the recent topics on Paul Lamere's Duke Listens! blog. Also review Sec. 2.4 of Orio's Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review (see the assignment for 1/23, above). Consider posting a 250- to 500-word response to something in either of these on our Google Group.

Write up a proposal for your project of two pages or so. Follow the guidelines for proposals in the "Guidelines for Writing and Rubric for Grading", and be as specific as you can! Talk about why this project is worth doing (my requiring you do a project isn't a good enough reason, sorry) as well as what you're going to do. If you're doing an experiment of some kind, you should also say something about what you expect and/or hope the outcome will be. If it takes you three or four pages instead of two, that's OK.

Also, read the Wikipedia article Musical Acoustics.

There's no assignment for today.

There's no assignment for today.

Demo and discussion of some important phenomena of musical acoustics, e.g., modes of vibration, standing waves (in a string), beats, harmonics, and sympathetic vibration.

Read a bit about the five phenomena listed in any reliable source. The "Acoustics Primer", Chapter 1 of the IU Center for Electronic and Computer Music's Introduction to Computer Music, should give you enough background. The relevant Wikipedia articles, including Musical Acoustics, are okay too, though some of them are written for people interested in the mathematics and get quite technical.

Read pp. 38-66 (Chapters 3 and the beginning of Chapter 4) of Pierce's The Science of Musical Sound, Revised Edition (on reserve for this class in the Music Library).

Turn in revised project proposals by today unless I've given you special dispensation.

There's no assignment for today.

There's no assignment for today.

HOMEWORK #5.

1. Use the Audacity audio editor to both learn its basic features and learn something about simple and complex sounds.
2. Do this additive-synthesis assignment. It requires a Mac running OS X, definitely at least v. 10.3 and possibly 10.4. Since most of our majors did this last semester, they can propose an alternative.
3. Extra credit: do this R programming exercise involving audio.

In Orio's Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review (see the assignment for 1/23, above), re-read some of the stuff on symbolic music: Secs. 2.3, 2.3.1, 2.4, 2.4.1. Orio argues that score and performance allow for the extraction of almost complementary information: talks about Information in symbolic scores and information in audio performances. For example, can you imagine a general way for a computer to express structure in music notation (including tonality) in peformance? How about converting expressive timing to notation? And what about converting rhythm from performance to CWMN or vice-versa? It might not be too hard if the actual rhythm is simple, the music really is "Western", and the performance is mechanical -- but what if the rhythm is complex and it's a musically satisfying performance? Also look through my Gallery of Interesting Music Notation. If you disagree with my explanations for these strange things, I'd love to hear what you think -- seriously.

Details TBA

No assignment for today.

Nothing was due, as it happened.

Details TBA (by you, to whoever you want)

For today, please read Kurth, Frank; Mueller, Meinard; Fremerey, Christian; Chang, Yoon-ha; & Clausen, Michael (2007). Automated Synchronization of Scanned Sheet Music with Audio Recordings. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2007), Vienna, Austria, pp. 261-266. Available at http://www.ismir.net/proceedings/. This will be heavy going for some of you, but the point of what they're doing should be easy to understand, and we'll have a demo of it (actually an earlier version, since the version described in the paper isn't available) in class.

HOMEWORK #6 (EXTRA CREDIT): Naturally, musicians want to play any sound that doesn't decay quickly for any length of time; synthesizer designers want to comply, but doing so isn't easy with "sampling" synthesizers (like the Kurzweil 250, which I helped develop) and the complex sounds of real instruments. Here's an exercise in creating a realistic instrument sound of any length.

Michel's presentation is on Typke, Rainer, Wiering, Frans, & Veltkamp, Remco C. (2004). A Search Method for Notated Polyphonic Music with Pitch and Tempo Fluctuations. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR 2004), available at http://ismir2004.ismir.net/proceedings/p053-page-281-paper120.pdf. Nothing is due.

There's no assignment.

In Orio's Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review (see the assignment for 1/23, above), read Chapter 3, "The Role of the User" (pp. 27-37).

Nothing is due.

In Orio's Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review (see the assignment for 1/23, above), read Chapter 4, "Music Processing" (pp. 38-52). The last section, on alignment of audio and score, is particularly interesting, and relevant to both visualization issues we've discussed and to score following as in Prof. Raphael's "Music Plus One".

Most of the remaining homework will be based on a series of symbolic music-searching programs in R:

1. preparatory music-searching programming assignment
2. music-searching programming assignment
3. fancier music-searching programming assignment

HOMEWORK #7. Part 1. Turn in an ESWE-fied version of your project proposal, plus a paragraph on your current status.

Part 2.

• Informatics & CompSci majors: do the 1st (preparatory) music-searching assignment. Also, take a look at a couple of the Web-based systems on Typke's website described below.
• Everyone else: do the following. Rainer Typke's website, "MIR Systems: A Survey of Music Information Retrieval Systems" has descriptions of and links to dozens of music-IR systems, a number of which can be used over the Web for free, e.g., C-Brahms, Musipedia, Midomi, Songtapper, Themefinder. (Midomi is particularly interesting because of its "social network" aspect.) Choose two, and use each to try to retrieve something you'd expect (from the description of the system and its database) it to be able to find. If you don't find it immediately, try to figure out why: i.e., is it really not there, or did a problem with your query or something else result in it not being found. As you do, take notes -- the verbal, not the musical, kind :-) . Turn your notes in.

No assignment.

No assignment.

Please watch at least minutes 9 to 25 (or, if you missed class Monday, the entire first 25 min.) of Luis Von Ahn's Google tech talk on his "Human Computation" idea. It'll take only about 16 min. (or, if you missed class Monday...well, you can figure it out). If you afford the time to watch more, I don't think you'll regret it.

HOMEWORK #8: Informatics & CompSci majors: do the 2nd and 3rd music-searching program. Non-majors: do the 1st music-searching program; for extra credit, also do the 2nd.

In Orio's Music Retrieval: A Tutorial and Review (see the assignment for 1/23, above), read Chapter 5, "Systems for Music Retrieval" (pp. 53-66).

TBA

Nothing is due.

Nothing is due.

Nothing is due.

Nothing is due.

Your five posts to the Google discussion group are due by class time.

Final projects (papers, programs, whatever you have) are due. Please submit your papers in hardcopy form. I'll probably be at the Music Library much of the day; you can ask for me, and if I'm there, I'll accept your paper in person. Otherwise, put them in my mailbox on the 2nd floor of the School of Informatics. I'll expect them by 9 AM tomorrow (Friday). Of course any computer-readable items -- programs, audio files, etc. -- must be sent electronically. Attachments to e-mail are fine if the total size of all your items is no more than 1.5 MB at the most; otherwise, please get them to me a different way (see directions in Miscellaneous Class Procedures, but slashtmp or a CDROM or DVD is probably best) and tell me how to get to them. Anything you're submitting electronically is due by midnight tonight.