Algorithmic music generation by harmony recombination with genetic algorithm

Algorithmic music composition has recently become an area of prestigious research in projects such as Google’s Magenta, Aiva, and Sony’s CSL Lab aiming to increase the composers’ tools for creativity. There are advances in systems for music feature extraction and generation of harmonies with short-time and long-time patterns of music style, genre, and motif. However, there are still challenges in the creation of poly-instrumental and polyphonic music, pieces become repetitive and sometimes these systems copy the original files. The main contribution of this paper is related to the improvement of generating new non-plagiary harmonic developments constructed from the symbolic abstraction from MIDI music non-labeled data with controlled selection of rhythmic features based on evolutionary techniques. Particularly, a novel approach for generating new music compositions by replacing existing harmony descriptors in a MIDI file with new harmonic features from another MIDI file selected by a genetic algorithm. This allows combining newly created harmony with a rhythm of another composition guaranteeing the adjustment of a new music piece to a distinctive genre with regularity and consistency. The performance of the proposed approach has been assessed using artificial intelligent computational tests, which assure goodness of the extracted features and shows its quality and competitiveness.

Conclusion

The final chapter summarizes the ideas presented in the previous chapters, highlights important issues, and opens up new perspectives for music education research. It discusses the utopian energy of music education and presents ideas about how to reconceptualize music education in view of social change. It reconnects the concepts developed in the previous chapters with significant notions in utopian studies to highlight the potential of this new music education approach, particularly in view of global crises. This final chapter tries to encourage utopian thinking to refine music education’s societal mission, but without forgetting or marginalizing its artistic and aesthetic dimensions.

New Music versus New Wave

This chapter offers a reception history of Big Science, showing the ways listeners constellated the album within fields of genre. In doing so, it offers a definition of genre that differentiates between concerns of audience and concerns of style, framing generic tags as the provisional result of ongoing negotiations between musical stakeholders. In particular, the chapter asks how listeners heard Big Science as either new music or new wave. It unpacks the aesthetics and underlying ethics of both of those genres, highlighting their overlap in concerns of timbre, race, gender, geography, and low-context aesthetics.

Classification of Music Instruments: An overview

Varieties of music instruments are available today to produce the audible sounds which are used to make a piece of music. The music instruments have been classified into various groups depending upon the size, materials, usages, structure, and others. But, today many new practices, experiments, devices, and new instruments have been emerged with the flow of time in musical field. For all the concerned with music, a neo-classification of instruments is ever raised a question. So, from the educational point of view, some of the new music instruments, which are played today, further should be re-classified for convenience. The present article is based on an overview upon the study about the music instruments by following the secondary data and analytical method. After interpretation and analysis, some music instruments, which are still unclassified are categorized under neo-classification.

Rastreando las huellas de la escucha performativa: la escritura como constelación archivística

Este artículo plantea una revisión de la historiografía musical nacionalista mexicana tomando como punto de partida un análisis comparativo de dos libros publicados en Ciudad de México a principios de la década de 1930, Instrumental precortesiano (1933) de Daniel Castañeda y Vicente T. Mendoza y Hacia una nueva música/Toward a New Music (1932-1937) de Carlos Chávez. En el contexto de la reconceptualización de la noción de archivo musical o archivo sonoro a partir de la escucha y la imaginación de la escucha, este artículo explora la posibilidad de acercarse a esos dos libros de manera relacional como archivos de aspiraciones y deseos. Esta constelación archivística nos ofrece un punto de entrada para comprender la relación performativa entre modernidad y tradición que informa el desarrollo de la narrativa nacionalista mexicana posrevolucionaria. El artículo sugiere que la invención del pasado en contrapunto con la imaginación del futuro que la escritura de estos libros pone en evidencia es una clave fundamental para entender el esencialismo de las aspiraciones que ha informado la historiografía musical mexicana de los últimos noventa años.

The Decade of the Violin Concerto: New Music and the Performer in the 1930s

The 1930s saw an unusually rich harvest of violin concertos. An examination of this group of works provides a singular and seldom-considered angle from which to view the music history of the interwar period. In spite of the widely divergent styles and personal approaches, the works are united by certain factors that result from the choice of genre, with an attendant set of historical and technical constraints. In addition, the violinists who commissioned and performed the concertos influenced the compositions to a greater extent than often realized; therefore, in order to understand the works, we must take into consideration the artistic personalities of the respective performers as well. Many of the concertos were written for a new type of soloist, mostly from the younger generation, who had made a firm commitment to new music – something that some superstar violinists were unwilling to do. The concertos offer good opportunities to study the relationships between composer and performer, still a somewhat neglected topic in musicological studies.

Singing and playing music through mobile applications: Smule, a new music experience

Mobile phones and the Internet combined have led to the creation of applications that allow their users to perform music using only their Smartphones. With the Smule applications that we analyze in this paper, people can sing karaoke together with other singers from all over the world, or play a tune with their fingertips tapping on a phone’s screen. Besides providing new entertainment activities, the Smule applications and their multiple options regarding audio and video editing can bring about new musical practices and musical artifacts. Smule users can sing duets remotely, without actually singing on the same time – a virtual collective performance. Singing karaoke becomes a solitary practice where togetherness is contrived but not achieved. Video recordings can be edited and shared on a built-in social network, thus being endorsed with a new function: to create bonds within a social network. Analyzing the discourses of Smule creators and developers, we also show that the applications do not achieve what they are promised to do, namely providing social and authentic practices.