03.31 - Musical Patois — reflections of language in music

Visions and Voices: the USC Arts and Humanities Initiative

Thursday, March 31, 2011 : 7:30pm University Park Campus Alfred Newman Recital Hall (AHF) Admission is free.

Musical Patois is the result of a unique collaboration among a neuroscientist, a composer, a performer/engineer and a computer scientist. This event will boldly explore and transgress the boundaries between science, music, technology and art. The event is inspired by the research of neuroscientists Aniruddh Patel and John Iversen and composer Jason Rosenberg, which demonstrated that the instrumental music of British and French composers reflects the rhythm and intonation of their native languages. Patel, along with composer Peter Child, pianist-engineer Elaine Chew and computer scientist Alexandre François, will examine the influence of language on music through an evening of scientific presentation, musical performance, interactive visualization and lively conversation.

Organized by Elaine Chew (Engineering) and Alexandre François (Engineering).

More information at the Visions and Voices website.

03.31 - When Music & Technology Collide

Megan Dickey or Annenberg Radio News interviews Elaine Chew about this evening's Musical Patois event. The interview is posted here.

03.23 - Mirman School STEM Keynote

Elaine Chew is the keynote speaker at the Women in STEM event at the Mirman School for Gifted Children, where she gives a talk on Music, Mathematics, and Computing.  Keyboard Concepts provided the Yamaha Disklavier used in the lecture-demonstration.

Pictured to the left are the USC women faculty who also gave presentations at the event.

03.14 - Article accepted to MCM

An article submitted by the lab to the 3rd International Conference on Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM 2011) has just been accepted! It is entitled "Emergent formal structures of factor oracle-driven musical improvisations" and was co-authored by Isaac Schankler, Jordan Smith, Alexandre François, and Elaine Chew.

The article investigates the formal structure of several improvisations performed by Isaac interacting with Mimi: a number of formal analyses of these performances are presented, after which several typical structures (such as rondo- and canon-like structures) are observed. Finally, potential reasons for the emergence of these structures are discussed.

Structure analyses of Performance 1

Structure analyses of Performance 2

Structure analyses of Performance 3

The above annotations were created by the improviser (Schankler) and an experienced structure analyst (Smith).

The MCM 2011 conference takes place from June 15 to 18 in Paris, France at IRCAM.

03.07 - Jordan Smith's Master's thesis

The final version of lab member Jordan Smith's Master's thesis, completed at McGill University under Prof. Ichiro Fujinaga, has this past month been submitted and approved. It describes a MIREX-like evaluation (i.e., a benchmark evaluation) of music structure analysis algorithms. A direct download link is here: PDF.

Others working on music structure analysis may be interested in downloading the evaluation data, all of which are public and downloadable at Jordan's website. The thesis also introduces a modest new data set for structure analysis that consists entirely of public domain recordings, so anyone can download and share it.

Jordan continues to work on music structure-related research both at MuCoaCo (he and Isaac Schankler recently submitted an article to MCM on the structure of improvisations performed with Mimi) and back at McGill, through the SALAMI project which has created a large new database of structural analyses.

03.05 - Preview of Musical Patois at FAST: live webcast

The preview of Musical Patois takes place at the MIT150 Festival of Arts, Science, and Technology as part of FAST Thinking. The event is webcast live at: www.media.mit.edu/events/webcast/fast.html. A slide show of the Mar 5 FAST-Thinking events can be found at: http://arts.mit.edu/fast/fast-thinking-events