Peter Nelson

• Professor Emeritus at University of Edinburgh

I have previously situated the UPIC of Iannis Xenakis, a computer music instrument of legendary intransigence, as set apart from the mainstream of electroacoustic technologies, developing its own "voice" as the utterance of "prophetic" traces: ancient, not modern. Here, I will approach the sound of the UPIC from the perspective of Robert Hatten's r...

The current succession of centenaries of members of a significant group of European composers who made their work in the second half of the twentieth century gives us cause to think again about the historical situation they faced, in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the ways in which their responses to that situation shaped both their cre...

Music can be understood as a phenomenon that entwines sound and listening : sounds are not just there for the taking, they have to be identified – constructed even – in an interplay between the phenomenon of the sound and the phenomenon of the listening. This formulation goes to the heart of a contemporary ethos , which is an evening out of the hie...

Space is a concept central to music. Particular spaces can be seen as the enablers and analogues of social configurations for music-making. Thus, for example, concert halls, clubs or cathedrals determine significant aspects of the social and auditory presence of heard music, in terms of concepts such as proximity, separation, resonance, silence, co...

The important roles of prediction and prior experience are well established in music research and fit well with Clark's concept of unified perception, cognition, and action arising from hierarchical, bidirectional predictive processing. However, in order to fully account for human musical intelligence, Clark needs to further consider the powerful a...

Most accounts of rhythm focus on notions of duration, pulse and metre, to explore the practices and constructs by which those involved in music performances co-ordinate their involvement. Yet there is a significant body of musical practice where sounds co-habit in time, without the same sorts of constraints found in metric co-ordination: from the g...

MarcLemanEmbodied Music Cognition and Mediation TechnologyThe MIT PressCambridge, MA, and London2008 ISBN 978-0-262-12293-1 - Volume 14 Issue 1 - Peter Nelson

In this paper we attempt to demonstrate the strengths of Hierarchical Hidden Markov Models (HHMMs) in the representation and modelling of musical structures. We show how relatively simple HHMMs, containing a mini- mum of expert knowledge, use their advantage of having multiple layers to perform well on tasks where flat Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) s...

Simon Emmerson (ed.), Music, Electronic Media and Culture. Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000. ISBN 0-7546-0109-9 (hardback). - - Volume 9 Issue 2 - Peter Nelson

We present a memory-based model for melodic segmentation based on the notion of melodic density. The model emphasises the role of short-term memory and time in music listening, by modelling the effects of recency in the perception of boundaries. We describe the model in detail and compare it with Cambouropoulos' Local Boundary Detection Model for a...

The conceptual basis of the UPIC system is described and discussed, in particular its relation to the work of its orginator, Iannis Xenakis, to the science of acoustics and to the development of an intuitive graphic imagery. A possible pedagogical approac h to musical creation using the resources of the UPIC is developed, and the particular pedagog...

We address issues raised in designing a new work for saxophonist and digital media involving 3D motion capture technology. A saxophonist's kinaesthetics are recorded with a 3D motion capture system, and used as control data in the real-time processing of sound and 3D visuals. We address current gesture research and propose an extension to current g...