Composition Commons^™

Terry Riley's "In C" For Mobile Ensemble, David B. Wetzel, Griffin Moe, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications and Other Works

This workshop presents a mobile-friendly Web Audio application for a “technology ensemble play-along” of Terry Riley’s 1964 composition In C. Attendees will join in a reading of In C using available web-enabled devices as musical instruments. We hope to demonstrate an accessible music-technology experience that relies on face-to-face interaction within a shared space. In this all-electronic implementation, no special musical or technical expertise is required.

Accepted for presentation and publication at WAC 2024.

Liquid Tab, Nathan Hulet

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Guitar transcription is a complex task requiring significant time, skill, and musical knowledge to achieve accurate results. Since most music is recorded and processed digitally, it would seem like many tools to digitally analyze and transcribe the audio would be available. However, the problem of automatic transcription presents many more difficulties than are initially evident. There are multiple ways to play a guitar, many diverse styles of playing, and every guitar sounds different. These problems become even more difficult considering the varying qualities of recordings and levels of background noise.

Machine learning has proven itself to be a flexible tool …

A New Way To Make Music: Processing Digital Audio In Virtual Reality, Gavin E. Payne

Senior Projects Spring 2022

The work of this project attempts to provide new methods of creating music with technology. The product, Fields, is a functional piece of virtual reality software, providing users an immersive and interactive set of tools used to build and design instruments in a modular manner. Each virtual tool is analogous to musical hardware such as guitar pedals, synthesizers, or samplers, and can be thought of as an effect or instrument on its own. Specific configurations of these virtual audio effects can then be played to produce music, and then even saved by the user to load up and play with …

Lulling Waters: A Poetry Reading For Real-Time Music Generation Through Emotion Mapping, Ashley Muniz, Toshihisa Tsuruoka

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Through a poetic narrative, “Lulling Waters” tells the story of a whale overcoming the loss of his mother, who passed away from ingesting plastic, as he attempts to escape from the polluted oceanic world. The live performance of this poem utilizes a software system called Soundwriter, which was developed with the goal of enriching the oral storytelling experience through music. This video demonstrates how Soundwriter’s real-time hybrid system was able to analyze “Lulling Waters” through its lexical and auditory features. Emotionally salient words were given ratings based on arousal, valence, and dominance while the emotionally charged prosodic features of the …

Finding Music In Chaos: Designing And Composing With Virtual Instruments Inspired By Chaotic Equations, Landon P. Viator

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Using chaos theory to design novel audio synthesis engines has been explored little in computer music. This could be because of the difficulty of obtaining harmonic tones or the likelihood of chaos-based synthesis engines to explode, which then requires re-instantiating of the engine to proceed with sound production. This process is not desirable when composing because of the time wasted fixing the synthesis engine instead of the composer being able to focus completely on the creative aspects of composition. One way to remedy these issues is to connect chaotic equations to individual parts of the synthesis engine instead of relying …

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

Musical Behaviours: Algorithmic Composition Via Plug-Ins, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

The author’s recent software research addresses a deficiency in commercial musical composition software: the limited ability to apply algorithmic processes to the practice of musical composition. The remedy takes the form of a software plug-in design called “musical behaviours” — compositional algorithms of limited scope that can be applied cumulatively and in real time to MIDI performance data. The software runs on the author’s software composition platform, The Transformation Engine.

Algorithmic Music Composition And Accompaniment Using Neural Networks, Daniel Wilton Risdon

Senior Projects Spring 2016

The goal of this project was to use neural networks as a tool for live music performance. Specifically, the intention was to adapt a preexisting neural network code library to work in Max, a visual programming language commonly used to create instruments and effects for electronic music and audio processing. This was done using ConvNetJS, a JavaScript library created by Andrej Karpathy.

Several neural network models were trained using a range of different training data, including music from various genres. The resulting neural network-based instruments were used to play brief pieces of music, which they used as input to create …

Misheard Me Oronyminator: Using Oronyms To Validate The Correctness Of Frequency Dictionaries, Jennifer G. Hughes

Master's Theses

In the field of speech recognition, an algorithm must learn to tell the difference between "a nice rock" and "a gneiss rock". These identical-sounding phrases are called oronyms. Word frequency dictionaries are often used by speech recognition systems to help resolve phonetic sequences with more than one possible orthographic phrase interpretation, by looking up which oronym of the root phonetic sequence contains the most-common words.

Our paper demonstrates a technique used to validate word frequency dictionary values. We chose to use frequency values from the UNISYN dictionary, which tallies each word on a per-occurance basis, using a proprietary text corpus, …

A Particle System For Musical Composition, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

This paper describes the development of a software particle system for musical composition. It employs a generator as described in William Reeves’ seminal 1983 paper on the subject, but one in which the particles are musical themes rather than images or points of light. This is distinct from an audio-level particle system such as might be employed effectively in conjunction with granular synthesis, because an audio-level process has no “musical intelligence” in the traditional sense as the term is used in discussing rhythm, melody, harmony or other traditional musical qualities. The particle system uses the author’s software, The Transformation Engine …

Software Tools For Electronic Wind Instrument Performance, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

Even though alternate musical controllers such as the Electronic Wind Instrument (EWI) significantly extend the expressive range of MIDI synthesizers and software virtual instruments, the computer-based editing and manipulation of data produced by these controllers has remained in an undeveloped state. A primary problem has to do with the binding of note data to expressive information such as breath controller and pitch bend data. MIDI, originally designed as a real-time performance protocol, has very weak binding of such data into higher-level musical structures; so weak in fact that even note endings are unconnected to their beginnings. The author describes a …

The Transformation Engine, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

The Transformation Engine is a software music composition system for the Macintosh computer, based on a hierarchical model of musical structure derived from the theories of Heinrich Schenker. It implements processes of musical transformation in real time, i.e. Schenkerian prolongations (“composing-out”) can be executed while the user listens to a high performance MIDI rendering of the music. The Transformation Engine also employs technical devices derived from the musical theories of Joseph Schillinger. The software has been used for algorithmic composition using planetary position data and chaotic processes as drivers for musical transformations. It also has applications to traditional forms of …

Evolution Of Musical Organisms, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

The development of software for musical applications has led to a proliferation of elaborate control paradigms with extremely large parameter spaces. These spaces can be daunting to explore interactively because of their vastness. Furthermore, parameters often interact in ways not made explicit by the control panel, effectively increasing the complexity of the space even further. Application of genetic algorithms (GAs) can be used to search through these vast spaces in a highly efficient manner. Coordinated control of interacting parameters is handled automatically by this system. Even for control paradigms that are well understood, the genetic algorithm can efficiently search out …

A Computer-Based Editor For Lerdahl And Jackendoff's Rhythmic Structures, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

In “A Generative Theory of Tonal Music”, Lerdahl and Jackendoff discuss two forms of rhythmic structure which they call metrical structure and grouping structure. Together these constitute a basis for an analytical understanding of rhythmic structure in music. This article is about a software based editor which allows the interactive exploration of these two types of hierarchical rhythmic structures.

Towards A Chaotic Musical Instrument, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

The goal of this project is to produce a software musical instrument using chaotic processes as a sound synthesis method. Real-time control through MIDI note messages and continuous controllers is required. Early results are described, along with suggestions for continuing work.

New Software Composition Tools, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

This paper briefly discusses a number of software tools developed at the author's studio through the course of research work into algorithmic composition. Most of the tools developed are directly related to recursive techniques; some, however, arise from more general techniques of algorithmic composition first described by Joseph Schillinger.

Examples of recursive techniques include:
• META-FRACTALS - separating musical content from recursive structure
• the Lorenz attractor and Koch snowflake as musical generators
• Iterated Function Systems as musical generator
• dynamic values in the logistic equation and the Mandelbrot set.

Non-recursive tools include:
• the Intelligent Interval Tool - …

The Development Of Context Sensitivity In The Midiforth Computer Music System, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

This paper reports on the development in the MIDIFORTH computer music system of context-sensitive editing features, such as the ability to highlight MIDI events based on their position within a melodic or rhythmic pattern, and on pitch or other relationships to surrounding events. The software mechanism that implements this is discussed, and some examples of the musical desirability of such features are presented.

The Schillinger System Of Musical Composition And Contemporary Computer Music, Bruno Degazio

Publications and Scholarship

The author will describe the results of a research project involving the investigation of Joseph Schillinger's theories of rhythm and tonality as they relate to contemporary areas of algorithmic composition such as fractal music. In particular, the author will describe his work in the following areas:

a) the use of Schillinger's fundamental technique of interference

b) the relationship of Schillinger's notion of geometrical projection to techniques of fractal musical composition.

c) the application of fractal processes to Schillinger's emotional and semantic(connotational) schemes (i.e., the psychological dial).