8/13/2019 comj_e_00138

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About This Issue

This issues articles all concern

musical applications of audio signalprocessing. The first two articles dealwith composition; the last three withanalyzed recordings of performedmusic. Another commonality worthnoting is that three of the articlestitles contain the word automaticor automated. The notion of auto-mated or semi-automated audio anal-ysis shows up in the contents of theother two articles as well. Automa-tion has always been prominent incomputer music research, of course.Indeed, it is difficult to identify any

sphere of human music-making thatis insusceptible to emulation by dig-ital automata, even if in some casesthe practice of such emulation is stillnascent.

Automated composition by com-puters hardly represents a nascentcase, dating as it does back to thelate 1950s. At that time musiqueconcr `ete, with its techniques ofcollage derived from recordings ofnatural sounds, had already beenestablished as an art form; andyet the lions share of the ensuing

half-centurys effort in algorithmiccomposition has been devoted insteadto note-based music, with its more-conventional materials of pitch andrhythm. The reasons for that slantare several, including technologicalreasons (e.g., the earlier advent ofdigital audio synthesis as comparedto digital audio recording) and con-ceptual ones (e.g., the greater ease ofcharacterizing pitches and rhythmsas compared to timbres). This issues

Front cover. Old Man by composerand artist Kyong Mee Choi. Acrylic oncanvas, reproduced here in grayscale.

first article, by Nick Collins, seeks

to rectify this imbalance in algorith-mic composition by investigatinghow computers might imitate thepractices of human composers ofacousmatic music (a term that issometimes used to encompass allmusic composed for fixed-media play-back without performers, but whichoften refers, as it does here, morespecifically to styles procedurally andaesthetically indebted to musiqueconcr `ete).

The second article, by GregoireCarpentier et al., discusses how

composers have availed themselves ofthe automatic orchestration softwarenamed Orchidee. This survey ofthree composers work complementsthe earlier article by Carpentier andcolleagues, published in CMJ34:1,on the technological design of thatsoftware.

Next, we present two technicalarticles about systems useful tomusic students who wish to modeltheir playing on recordings of mastermusicians. The first of these articles,dealing with intonation, argues for

the utility of a digital tuner that doesnot assume preset frequencies. Forcertain types of music, such as thetraditional Turkish makam musicused as the case study in the articleby Bars Bozkurt, instrument tuningis quite variable and in any case doesnot adhere to theoretical constructs.Instead of predefined frequencies,therefore, the system contains care-fully looped samples of pitches playedby a master musician. The user

Back cover. In this figure from thearticle by Lorenzo J. Tardon et al., acollection of musical pieces is plot-ted as points in a space whose threedimensions each signify a differentgenre.

tunes an instrument to those audio

exemplars, aided by a visual display.The second of these technical

articles concerns automatic anno-tation of violin music. Whereas thearticle by Cordelia Hall and JohnODonnell in the previous issue ofCMJinvestigated computer-assistedannotation of violin bowing, AkiraMaezawa et al.s article examinesviolin fingering. Unlike some priorresearchers in this area, the authorsderive the fingering from audiorecordings, analyzing the spectralcharacteristics to ascertain on which

string each pitch was played, andcombining that information with amodel of ergonomic fingering.

The final article, by LorenzoTardon et al., presents a techniquefor visualization of music collections.Various researchers have studied howto represent collections of songs(i.e., audio recordings, typically ofpopular music) in a multidimensionalspace. The authors of the currentarticle contribute to this field withtheir method for nonlinearly project-ing cepstral-coefficient signatures of

a set of songs onto a space whose axescorrespond to genres.

The issue continues with three CDreviews, two of which were writtenby our reviews editor, Ross Feller.One of the reviewed discs is by aTurkish composer, the other two byAmericans. Rounding out the issueare its opening and closing sections:News, edited by Rebecca Fiebrink,and Products of Interest, edited byMargaret Cahill.

About This Issue 1