Musical Information Beyond Measurement and Computation

This chapter elaborates on the concepts of music information and information processing by bringing together the fields of computation, cybernetics and the dynamic systems approach. It conceives of music users as autonomous agents that behave as adaptive devices that construct their musical knowledge as the outcome of continuous epistemic interactions with the sonic world. As such, it challenges the classical symbolic-conceptual approach to musical information in terms of static, discrete and objective categories in favor of a trans-classical model that relies on subjective, process-like and non-discrete categories of meaning. In an attempt to go beyond traditional dichotomies, it proposes a hybrid perceptual-conceptual approach that does justice both to the richness and fullness of perceptual experience and the plasticity of mental operations in a kind of symbolic play.

Supporting Everyday Creativity in Ubiquitous Music Making

The concept of everyday musical creativity is related to non-professional musical activities carried out in venues not intended for artistic practice. Everyday musical creativity demands technological support to provide access to musical resources by non-musicians and by musicians engaging in musical activities in domestic and public spaces. This chapter covers key aspects of the conceptual ubiquitous music framework and its methodological implications for the support of everyday creative activities. We discuss strategies to enhance music information value within the context of two sets of studies, the first set focusing on the development of an interaction metaphor and the second set dealing with the assessment of technological requirements to support creative musical activities in educational contexts. One of the implications of the methodological framework proposed by ubiquitous music studies is the expanded notion of musical information as a product of creative experience rather than as an abstract symbolic system.

Exploring Singing Vocal Pedagogy in the Greek Elementary School through Interactive Technologies

A growing body of interdisciplinary research suggests that children's structured engagement in musical activities may have a positive impact on social inclusion by means of offering opportunities for social bonding, developing interpersonal relationships and empowering self-expression, health and well-being. In this paper we investigate the amelioration of children's voice accuracy and quality in signing through a visual feedback software. The research took place in two public elementary schools in Athens in a total of sixty children aged 6-9 years old and with a different cultural background. The statistical analysis on the effectiveness of the software has proved the amelioration of the children's voice quality before and after its use.

Engagement and Creativity in Music Education

The wider benefits of active engagement with music throughout life have been well documented. There is evidence that playing a musical instrument and integrating music in the curriculum can have a range of positive effects on children's self-esteem, their social behavior and cognitive skills, such as creativity, spatial-temporal ability, reading, language and IQ score. Music is a vital part of children's everyday lives and schools have a major role to play in helping children develop a positive musical identity by encouraging active participation in musical activities. When children are actively involved in creative work in music, they are affectively, behaviorally and cognitively engaged with the creative task. This chapter concludes that there is a problem with lack of engagement in formal music education and that we need to do more to understand why many students are disengaged with music at school and put music to its proper place of being an integral part of students' lives.

Overview of Approaches and Future Challenges for Development of Music Recommendation Socio-Technical Systems

This paper analyses the position of music recommendations in the wider context of music information behavior research and proposes five music information behavior dimensions: socio-cognitive information experience, information seeking, information retrieval, recommendations, and content consumption and analysis. It examines different approaches in the development of music recommendation systems (RS) which are applicable to all types of web information resources. These approaches are classified as content-based, collaborative, demographic, knowledge-based, meta-data-based, emotion-based and context-based, while the hybrid approach to RS development combines two or more approaches into one. Also, recent developments in the domain of music recommendations are discussed in detail. Finally, challenges and opportunities for collaboration between the scientific and the commercial communities on the development of new RS models are being explored.

The Knowledge Instinct, Cognitive Functions of Music and Cultural Evolution

Evolution of music ability has been considered a mystery from Aristotle to Darwin and as no adaptive purpose has been identified yet, making music is still a puzzle for evolutionary biologists. This chapter considers a new theory of music origin and evolution, identifying a cognitive function of music which helps overcoming cognitive dissonance based on the unification of consciousness that is differentiated by language. According to this theory, music is fundamental for cultural evolution. The reason for music strongly affecting us is that it helps overcoming unpleasant emotions of cognitive contradictions, which are conditions of accumulating knowledge. The chapter considers experimental evidence supporting this theory and the joint evolution of music, culture, and consciousness.

Catalogue Æsthetics

The technological breakthroughs of the previous century caused a series of profound cultural shifts, which led to the digitalization of developed societies. Accordingly, the listening paradigm of the 21st century is no longer that of being passively exposed to music. Instead, contemporary audiences are typically expected to dynamically traverse collections of (big) data and, synthesize, rather than just access, musical content, employing several overlapping interfaces. In a similar fashion, the compositional schemata of the past have been shifted to account for the predominant symbolic form of our times, i.e. the Database. In that vein, several approaches to database (driven) music are scrutinized in this chapter, both in historical retrospective, as well as with respect to contemporary compositional practices.

Design of an Automatic Music Transcription System for the Traditional Repertoire of the Marovany Zither from Madagascar

This chapter presents an original approach for the development of an automatic music transcription system of a Malagasy traditional plucked string instrument, called marovany zither. Our approach is based on a technology of multichannel capturing sensory system, which allows breaking down a complex polyphonic audio signal into a sum of monophonic sensor signals. A very high precision in transcription is obtained, i.e. & gt; 95% on the average note-based F-measure metric. A second part of this chapter consists in using these transcripts in the human-machine improvisation system ImproteK. Details of an exploratory working session with a local Malagasy musician are reported and discussed.

Automatic Melodic Harmonization

Automatic melodic harmonization tackles the assignment of harmony content (musical chords) over a given melody. Probabilistic approaches to melodic harmonization utilize statistical information derived from a training dataset, producing harmonies that encapsulate some harmonic characteristics of the training dataset. Training data is usually annotated symbolic musical notation. In addition to the obvious musicological interest, different machine learning approaches and algorithms have been proposed for such a task, strengthening thus the challenge of efficient and effective music information utilization using probabilistic systems. Consequently, the aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the specific research domain as well as to shed light on the subtasks that have arisen and since evolved. Finally, new trends and future directions are discussed along with the challenges which still remain unsolved.

Theoretical and Applied Issues on the Impact of Information on Musical Creativity

This century is an era of information and knowledge intensification. Novel information systems and services are developing through modern online information technologies. The rapid changes in the online information environment have greatly affected the way in which individuals search for music information and engage with musical creativity, within different music domains and for different purposes which involve composition, performance and improvisation, analysis and listening. The aim of this book chapter is to investigate the theoretical and practical issues relating to the impact of music information on musical creativity from an information seeking behavior perspective. Musical creativity is perceived as an intentional process which acts as a motivator for information seeking, leading to the utilization of different information resources and to the development of specific information seeking preferences. The chapter highlights the implications for research in this area and presents a research agenda for the interrelation between music information seeking and musical creativity.