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The work of George and Shamir describes a method to use spectrogram as an image for classifying audio records. The method described is interesting, but the results seemed to me a little adjusted to the chronology and not to the spectrogram properties at itself. The spectrogram gives a limited information about the audio signal, but it is enough to do a classification method?
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Spectrogram presented not only the frequency content of the signal but also its energy. The spectrogram's vertical axis represents frequency, with the lowest frequencies at the bottom and the highest frequencies at the top, while the horizontal axis represents time; it runs from left to right of the axis. The colors enrich the spectrogram representation as its third dimension; different colors represent different energy levels . so if you combine it with classifier such as CNN which is manly image classifier it might give good results
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When I look around I see the number of people listening to sad music is much higher than those who listening to cheerful music. I know it varies from one culture to another.
I can imagine the previous experiences of a listener plays a great role in habit of listening but to what extend the sad music relates to past incidents and events of listeners?
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on what basis is the music considered 'sad'? Some music is more inward and thoughtful rather than 'sad' as such. Music can give or appears to give expression to or chime in with a mood that someone is in and so they feel understood or comforted. There is quite a lot of research into 'music in everyday life' and how and why people listen to what.
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Has anyone done an experiment using a dichotic listening test? I am looking at conducting a dichotic listening test using music - it would be great if someone could share their experience with me on their methodology. I am looking at presenting simultaneously a tone, chord, rhythm and melody. 
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Thank you very much, Florian and Alessandro! 
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I need to analyse the music structure of a haevy metal song, is there any "protocol" to follow, for best and more objective analysis? I am a biologist and in my PhD course I want to study the impact of rock in cell metabolism.
Thanks for helping me.
Danielle - Brasil
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You could try a musical harmonic (and melodic) analysis If you think there is something harmonic affecting the cells, but given that such things as harmony have cultural origins I would find that surprising.
However, you may have success with a spectral analysis of the music being played. That is not particularly musical in the traditional sense of music theory (although it's used in electroacoustic music) but it is likely to give you some repeatable results with accurate data points. There are several tools available for spectral analysis, including Praat, Tapestrea, and others.
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Since music has different dimensions such as notes with melody, amplitude modulation, rhythm accompaniment, timbre etc. finding similar musical pattern is a challenging task. For polyphonic music it is more challenging and difficult task. 
Any work done for matching melodic pattern and finding similarity associated? 
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Yes, those are the elements that I understood you to mean, and you will find a lot of information on it in the ISMIR conference proceedings. You will also find information in the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) proceedings - http://quod.lib.umich.edu/i/icmc/ - although it is less focussed on what you want than ISMIR.
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We like to think that music is mathematical but according to Wikipedia there is no axiomatic basis for music.  How are musical sets constructed using basic set theoretic tools of union, intersection, and complimentation?
I propose using sequences in tablature music for guitar to study how polyphonic objects are constructed by adding point-wise limits to the continuous function of pitch.  Tablature music is a rich algebraic language that has substantial archival, educational, cultural, and economic significance but no mathematic theory of tablature exists.
I have mastered reading and writing tablature.  Anyone familiar with my study of multiple parathyroid tumors in the Journal of Theoretic Biology back in 1985 can see I have substantial training in mathematics.
I need a mathematician who knows model theory or algebraic topology to review my work. Please see the attached manuscript if you are interested in making a modern mathematic model for music theory.
The basic problem: Are music sets constructible?
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I am a professional musicologist and music theorist, and I must confess that what you people write is Chinese to me. Music can be notated in staff notation, or in various kinds of tablature, or in various types of alphanumeric notations. Passing from the one to the other (which is called "transcription") can now be automated, especially with the help of MusicXML and MEI (Music Encoding Initiative).
BUT this all is valid only provided that the music can be notated at all. And the transcriptions exclusively concern the notated aspects of the music. Notation is utterly unable to notate everything. What it notates is called "notes", which represent a combination of pitch and duration. But, because notations (like music itself) are semiotic systems, the notated pitches and durations are but abstract categories escaping any attempt at quantification. Notes are distinctive elements of a semiotic system. And, in addition, not every music can be notated, which probably means that not every music is semiotic.
The so called pitch classes of musical set theory are abstractions. If they are considered classes properly speaking (which I doubt they are), then the members of these classes must themselves be considered abstractions, and so also are the intervals between them. And none of this can be evaluated in terms of "true/false". Musical set theory is not a set theory in the sense of Zermelo-Frankel.
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It could even be a book or paper that deals with that kind of approach.
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If we make a graph of the pitch values and the piano key numbers then we have what seems to be a graph of the line x = y.  If we graph the strings of the guitar then it seems the strings do not intersect.  In fact, the graph does not lie in the R2 plane.  The guitar strings actually do intersect at the system fundamental by gluing, which makes a directed multigraph.   This means music is defined in projective space and not in affine space.  In affine theory all guitar tunings are the same, but that is obviously not true.
You may think the guitar fret board has two dimensions (string, fret) but in fact there are 3 directions of tone movement.  To demonstrate this consider the isotonic line that connection notes with the same pitch, starting at the top string, zero fret.  Along this line the fret and string numbers move in opposite directions but pitch does not change.  The isotonic line is not movement by string or by fret because in these directions the pitch rises or falls in the same direction as the string or frets.  That is, pitch goes up, so does the string or fret number.
In the same way, it is easily shown in the graph of pitch and piano keys that the graph is not correctly drawn because there is a a triangle that is 1 octave in length on three sides and has at least one right angle.  Therefore the pitch position triangle does not lie in a plane.
Similarly, on piano there are 2 directions of movement: by pitch value and by musical key.  But the transposing piano with a lever to shift the keyboard shows there is a third degree of freedom.
Tablature is an algebraic system that represents guitar music.  Sequences in tablature are written using a typed alphabet of fret numbers on a horizontal staff representing the string lines.  Since sequences in tablature are written using integers, the central question is how the integers are induced by the system fundamental using basic set theory operations.  Briefly, construction starts with the null set and then defines the system fundamental by a key function that maps F to the frequency domain.  This defines a point (0, 1) which is a new direction and a unit of measure.  Then the octave point (1, 1) makes an identity (an a filter) in a metric space.
The guitar strings are the open cover of the guitar model because every point on the guitar is contained in at least one string.  Therefore the guitar is convex,  compact, and complete.  Convex means there is no line between any 2 points on guitar that lies outside the guitar.  Complete means that it is possible to construct every possible sequence.  The union of the strings is the interior of the guitar and the intersection is the closure.   The numbers in tablature are ordinals and the numbers in the guitar tuning ring signature are a cardinals.   So if the guitar tuning EADGBE is expressed as the intervals (0 5 5 5 4 5), then we have a Zariski topology that is a  decidable 6-tupple.  In this theory the piano have at most 1 tonal center while the guitar has 5.  This makes the guitar tuning a Baire metric space.
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I consider that music analysis must be consolidated under new points of view,: the open, live, and music connected sociology, like sociosophy understanding of music history. By other side, the music listening must be more rich and productive, music is history, life of society, so, por this reason it is very important to apply elements of musicosophy. Now I am working in Shostakovich`s music, and I found there we all we have a bigger field. I need this suppor, and found materials about this new perspectives to apply my theories and opinions.
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New neologisms to me,But they imply new approaches to theories of  philosophy and sociology of music.  What is "new" in your coining of these terms?  My recent contribution to both fields is: A brief introduction to the philosophy of music and music education as social praxis (Routledge 2016).  Maybe the "new point of view" is hinted at in that book.  LIving in Helsinki, I hope we might meet to discuss this--after you have read my book and find interest in my theory, not negativity.
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By incorporation, we mean any level of relationship between the traditional manifestation and the compositional process of the author.
We want to find pieces wherein music parameters from both new composition and traditional music would be somehow related.
For instance, the composer could create his pitch logics, sense of time, textures, musical gestures, rhythmic, sound colors, process, performance rituals, among others, based on aspects of the traditional culture's music.
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I would like to add that the composers of "Música Viva" Mouvement associated 12 tone technique with Brazilian elements in many works composed around 1950  like "Negrinho do Pastoreio" (by Catunda) and "Quartet n. 1" (by Guerra Peixe) and Música para Cordas (Claudio Santoro). .
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I need to know how music processing can be carried out using Java. Please suggest any references or sites if any.
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You can try out jaudio. It is for audio processing not specifically for music but we can use it for music. 
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I'm trying to apply non-functional relations between triads and seventh chords and between traditional scales to the classical guitar using harmonic progressions from the works of romantic and modern classical composers as referents for improvisation.
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I am personally very interested in graph theory, abstract algebra and group theory as methods to travel through pitch space, organize melodic contour, and so on.  I have yet to turn this all into an article, but I am in the process and hope to publish (eventually).  There are a lot of good books on this, but I have found A Book on Abstract Algebra by Charles Pinter to be particularly approachable -- very grounded in applications of permutation groups and their associated graphs.
There is a theorem by Cayley that states (I think I have this at least approximately correct!) that every finite group is isomorphic to a permutation group, which is basically to say that if you understand permutation groups you understand a great deal about transformations in general.
As far as music is concerned, I think the first thing I would recommend is David Lewin's Generalized Musical Intervals and Scales and his PLR transformations in particular. Dmitri Tymoczko has a lot on the Tonnetz concept.  Bob Morris has done a lot of work on group theory applications to music, although it requires a fair amount of background.  Also, there's a pretty interesting article by Michele Intermont and Aileen Murphy in College Mathematics Journal 42/3 (2011) called "An Application of Group Theory to Change Ringing" which you might find helpful.  A rather different approach but I think VERY interesting can be found in the Harmony Book of Elliott Carter, regarding how all the possible chords in 12 eq. temp. pitch class space can be broken up into component subsets and recombined into new collections (including a handy analysis of part of his guitar concerto in the preface).
There is a classic article called "Dissonant Prolongation" by Robert P. Morgan if you are interested in Schenkerian approaches; I don't have the article in front of me but I recall him prolonging diminished seventh chords in Wagner.  Really, a lot of his students (notably Salzer) delved into the application of Schenkerian analysis to music other than Mozart, Bach, Beethoven...  Generally speaking, you will find a lot of material like this if you just search for "prolongation" along with other words like "post-tonal", "atonal", etc.
I have a few pieces of music I have written that employ some of the above ideas (such as travelling exhaustively through the power set of a given set using Hamiltonian paths).  If you are interested, I would be happy to send them to you.  I suppose I should also mention that I've been writing a lot of music for classical guitar over the past few months, so if that is of interest, I'd be glad to send that along as well.  Best wishes on your research!
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In my submission "A Brief History of Modulation in Musical Rhetoric and Brahms'  Harmonic Ambiguity ", I identify the need for a study to correlate musical devices and mental states. The first step is to develop[ a catalog of such devices. These include among many effects, modulation (shifts in tonicity), silence, unison, changes in rhythmic texture etc.
By using the term "mental states", I choose a broader field than mere "emotion".
With an understanding of composition/improvisation (generative), there are a great many possibilities. Just within modulation, Max Reger has developed an extensive catalog of the devices, alas no mention is made of effect on an  audience. Rameau in his treatise on Harmony discusses very briefly an emotional response to chromatic modulation (please see my article for the citation specifics; Reger is not cited in this paper yet. It remains in an unfinished form: more than a few citations TBD.
Gee, how do I put a citation here? - simple footnote:
Max Reger: Modulation (Dover Books on Music) Paperback 2007
ISBN 048645732X
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Treatise on Harmony Dover 1971
ISBN 0-486-22461-9
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Hi everybody! I am looking for a (maybe free, open source) tool to visualize musical analyses while showing the score. It should allow to color parts of the score as well as writing notes on it (like roman numerals, functional symbols or just random text). Also nice would be to be able to play the score while highlighing thinks. So far, I have worked with PowerPoint but that is too inflexible for my purposes. The addressees are students of musicology or music theory as well as other scholars at conferences and so on.
So I am keen about your suggestions :)
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I use Finale for things like Schenkerian analysis -- just some effort with layers and the special tools menu and it's pretty straightforward once you get used to it. 
When it comes to group theory / transformation networks (e.g., David Lewin,  Dmitri Tymoczko) I unfortunately have no easy answer (if anyone else does, I would appreciate it!).
But I'm primarily adding my voice to the mix here to recommend AudioSculpt for Fast Fourier Analysis, among other things -- IRCAM has a lot of wonderful software for understanding music in spectral terms.
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Given the fact that music historiographies still today deals almost entirely with “dead subjects” (i.e. music of the last centuries which in many cases represents discourses not active anymore), is it possible to draft a non-linear concept of a contemporary history of music that focuses on the “effectiveness” of the past in the present (perhaps in the sense of Warburg´s pathos formula-idea)?
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You could also try to put your question into the context of media archeology, starting with Foucault's Archeology of Knowldege this would mean to consider music as a special discourse or a  number of discourses and as a media. This way music, its form and function also has to be seen within the context of other media. In the end history is not about dead things, it's just another (and helpful) way to see the present.
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Gian Francesco Malipiero.
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Hi Paolo
I am in Bologna and just finished archival research in Vienna and Venice.  It is starting to come together harmonically. My hope is to compare the tonality plans and pertinent harmonic progressions within those of the early works, to make interesting discoveries and interpretations.  Thank you so much for your kind and encouraging reply.  Love to keep in conact with your group.
Philip
Perth, Australia
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The scale has been developed in 2001 by the Goldsmiths to explore music engagement/abilities in non-musicians.
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Hello Imre, no I am not. But it looks interesting. My research question is whether older adults who are nonmusicians benefit from engagement in music.
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For instance, any research about how to use the different tuning systems and/or the equal temperament when there is a guitar in the ensemble.
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The composer Stephen Goss said in an interview (I can get you the text if you're interested): "Many composers fall into the trap of thinking of the guitar as first and foremost a harmonic instrument. I think of the guitar as a melody instrument, more a violin or a cello with extra possibilities of resonance, than as a piano with debilitating limitations."  He mentions the "learning curve" and the challenge that the instrument represents to the composer. The view from the "composer's side" is quite interesting.
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Hi all,
I need some help to use WEKA. The study which I am conducting researches if musical features of a song (such as the tempo or the key) are able to predict if a song will end up high or low in the charts. A logistic regression and discriminant analyses were conducted. In the next part of my study, I wanted to split the file on key (major and minor) and see if the other musical features are able to predict if a song will end high or low in the charts, when the data is split on key. In SPSS split file on key was easy, but how can I also do this in WEKA? So, what I am trying to figure out with this analysis is how songs which have a major key can predict if a song will end up high or low in the chart by using the other musical features and the same for minor key. Thanks for your help!
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Just curious how you define "The key of a song", if it is "more complex" than 4-5-1 ... 
Whats the other musical features ?
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I am interested in the ontological structure of improvised music and I would appreciate literature recommendations.
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It's taken me a while to get around to penning this, so apologies. It's a fascinating question. I think that Dave Wall makes some really great points on this above. If I understand the question correctly, you're really asking about how to consider improvised music as an entity from an ontological perspective. Why it's a good question is because I think that an awful lot of work on the ontology of music that has been published, up until really recently, simply cannot account for the possibility of an answer to this question because of the presuppositions that they pose in their account of the ontology of music. Similarly, for instance, an awful lot of work in the philosophy of music cannot admit, for instance, drone music within the category of music because of the ontological claims made about what can or cannot count as music. This proposition, as I see it, is patently absurd, entirely culturally conditioned and the result of a subjective position which is therefore entirely removed from ontological considerations. I would follow Dave in suggesting that to think about the ontology of music you have to start from the point of a view of a relational ontology and to then start to map out some of the other ontological conditions that will delimit the kinds of relations that will bring about something that we will call music, and I'd again follow Dave in saying that an intentional act that produces sound is here crucial. I'd add others though, and indeed this is what I've done in a recent book, Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise, in which I sugest the following ontological taxonomy of music, and this could of course apply to improvised music also:
(i) Music is sound that is
ii) structured,
iii) eminently expressive since its only form is its expressed content, and hence
iv) irreducible to a secondary function (such as representation),
v) conditioned by an assemblage in the real world (and therefore not transcendent or ahistorical)
In case you're interested in reading more, there's info on the book here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239152113_Noise_Matters_Towards_an_Ontology_of_Noise
Thanks for reading and I hope that this contributes something useful to the debate.
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I am someone from a different discipline who has been given the task of researching the music of Skrillex. As part of what I am doing, I would like to give a musicologist's interpretation of perhaps just one of his songs, but unfortunately I cannot do this myself and don't know anyone who can. I would just be looking for someone who could tell me simple things about the composition, or any anomalies if there happen to be any, or even someone who could transcribe it into sheet music for me. This would be the song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cXDgFwE13g. I am interested in the part that happens from 1:26 of this video, to 2:08, and similar.
Thank you in advance to anyone who can help me out, or can point me in the direction of someone who can.
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Did no one answer this? It may be too late, but the section at 1:26-2:08 is called "the drop" in the lingo of the "hard dusbtep" style, of which Skrillex is a practitioner. (He's much resented among dance music aficionados because he got famous for doing stuff which British producers and Americans, too, had been doing in clubs for years.) The "drop" is the section of a dubstep track which "drops" the bass in. Dropping the bass has been a standard live DJ trick since the 1990s, and is associated with moments of dance floor excitement: usually the DJ takes away the bass line, making the music seem to slow down or stop, and everyone in the crowd to wait motionless for the moment when the bass drops, when they all start dancing even more frantically.
Dubstep takes this bass drop to electronic extremes: the bass is layered, electronically distorted, and cut with complex automated filters until it "buzzes" and "wobbles" with energy. Many hard dubstep producers revel in the "brutality" of their drops, which are imagined as attacking or terrifying the listener. Thus the video is a great, literal visualization of how DJs view the drop: the sound waves literally pummel the listener into submission. There are a number of parody videos in which the effect of the drop on unsuspecting listeners is to toss them around the room like rag dolls.
Putting all that power into a little girl's hands is very Japanese anime/horror movie; the set-up of this video is like the movie _Audition_, in which the woman turns the table on sexual aggressors and tortures them...
Heavy.
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Do traditional classroom and instrumental lessons equip students to engage with, understand, analyse and perform contemporary music (contemporary classical rather than popular) as efficiently as western classical music from the Baroque to Romantic period? Considering music post 1950's, with new instruments and sound worlds created through technology, classical applications of time and key signature often not in use (aleatoric or serial music for example), common use of dissonant or unexpected intervals/cadences/harmony, new conceptual focus within pieces and extended techniques often being applied, do these works demand an equally contemporary pedagogical approach (and who or what may they be?) or do traditional methods suffice?
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What a great question! First, I must remind myself that 'traditional classroom and instrumental lessons' have different meanings for each one of us, who come from different countries. The Malaysian Ministry of Education started music education as a pilot project in 20 schools, in the 1990's. The equipment in schools used included gamelan instruments, recorder and harmonica. Most of the time, we play a simple melody line; little harmonization and some percussion.
However, many families who loved music made sacrifices to provide piano and/or violin lessons for their children. It's a sacrifice that we appreciate MOST when we have grown up! I think that training in western art/classical music is a great platform to prepare students to engage in contemporary classical music :)