Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Brian Boydell: Mosaics And Sketches, Cliona Doris, Denise Kelly, Ciaran O'Connell, David O'Doherty, Andreaa Banciu, Margaret Doris

Music recordings

Brian Boydell (1917-2000) Mosaics & Sketches: Chamber Music for Harp

Mosaics and Sketches explores the Irish composer Brian Boydell’s chamber music for harp written over two decades, 1960-1980. In this recording, Cliona Doris performs Boydell’s solo work for pedal harp, A Pack of Fancies for a Travelling Harper and is joined by TU Dublin Conservatoire colleagues in three chamber works: Four Sketches for Two Irish Harps, Five Mosaics for Violin and Harp, and Quintet for Flute, Harp and String Trio.

The recording was funded through a research grant from Technological University Dublin.

The support of RTÉ lyric fm and the …

“800 Years We Have Been Down”: Rebel Songs And The Retrospective Reach Of The Irish Republican Narrative, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

From the glamorous, cross-dressing “Rebel, Rebel” of David Bowie, to the righteous Trenchtown “Soul Rebel” of Bob Marley and The Wailers, both varied and various musical articulations of cultural and socio-political rebellion have long enjoyed a ubiquitous presence across multiple soundscapes. As a musicological delineator in Ireland, however, ‘rebel’ conveys a specifically political dynamic due to its consistent deployment as an all-encompassing descriptor for songs detailing events and personalities from the Irish national struggle. This paper sets out to examine the specific musical delineator of “rebel song” from both musicological and politico-ideological perspectives with a view to interrogating its appropriateness …

Ann Flood, Mairéad Farrell, And The Representation Of Armed Femininity In Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

This article critically considers the representation of armed femininity within the attendant song tradition of Irish physical-force Republicanism, with specific focus on the personal and cultural consequences for two prominent female Republican activists, both of whom successfully traverse the gender demarcation lines of war. While noting the didactic, often misogynistic, trajectory of works narrating ‘transgressive’ females within the broader ballad tradition, this article seeks to determine whether or not the interwoven essentialist tropes of death, martyrdom and resurrection — all deeply-embedded ideological constructs within the framework of Irish Republicanism — successfully supersede calcified patriarchal mores and in so doing, facilitate …

Songs And The Soil, Mark Garry, Louise Reddy

Books/Book Chapters

Published in conjuction with an exhibition. The exhibition engages with the subjects of landscape and music/sound—exploring each element from historical, social and culturally associative perspectives; where landscape is recognised as a fluid term articulating physical space, idealised space and social space that reflects a convergence of physical processes and cultural meaning, and where song act as a response to, or archive, of personal, historical or socio-political instances. Several works engage landscape and musical sound intersect. The exhibition integrates a broad range of media,positions and responses to these research subjects; including two film works, a six-hour soundtrack for a room, sonic …

Measuring Expressive Music Performances: A Performance Science Model Using Symbolic Approximation, Eamon O Doherty

Doctoral

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any …

Instrumental Music Learning In An Irish Bimusical Context, Mary Nugent

Doctoral

This study focuses on bimusical instrumental learning, exploring the perceptions, beliefs and musical practices of students who are simultaneously engaged in learning classical and Irish traditional musics. The literature on bimusicality addresses how it has evolved in various social and educational contexts. This research focuses on the bimusical learning processes and practices of students, aged sixteen to twenty years, as they cross between the different learning modes associated with these two musical traditions in an Irish context. This qualitative study adopts a collective case study approach, using a purposive sampling strategy. Data collected include: videotaped lessons, recorded practice/playing sessions, observations …

John Williams: An Evaluation Of His Impact Upon The Culture Of The Classical Guitar, Michael O'Toole

Doctoral

This thesis examines the career of the Australian guitarist John Williams and his impact upon the culture of the classical guitar. Williams has been a celebrated guitarist for more than six decades and has performed and recorded extensively during that period. He has made a remarkably varied contribution to guitar culture, performing in a wide variety of different styles, highlighting the guitar’s unique strength as a versatile and adaptable instrument. Williams’ career is in marked contrast to that of many of his contemporaries, including his mentor Andrés Segovia. Segovia believed the classical guitar must assert its individuality in order to …

Key Inference From Irish Traditional Music Scores And Recordings, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

The aim of this paper is to present techniques and results for identifying the key of Irish traditional music melodies, or tunes. Several corpora are used, consisting of both symbolic and audio representations. Monophonic and heterophonic recordings are present in the audio datasets. Some particularities of Irish traditional music are discussed, notably its modal nature. New key-profiles are defined, that are better suited to Irish music.

“Young Men Of Erin, Our Dead Are Calling”: Death, Immortality And The Otherworld In Modern Irish Republican Ballads, Seán Ó Cadhla

Articles

Irish physical-force Republicanism has long been noted for its tendency to promote the tropes of martyrdom and immortality as core tenets of its ideological belief system. This essay sets out to examine the genre of Republican death ballads so as to identify how such essentialist concepts are represented and promoted within the attendant song tradition. Particular attention will be paid to works that deploy overtly supernatural tropes in order to articulate the key Republican concept of heroic immortality. The present research will demonstrate the consistency with which such narrative devices have been retained within the Republican song tradition into the …

Note, Cut And Strike Detection For Traditional Irish Flute Recordings, Islah Ali-Maclachlan, Maciej Tomczak, Carl Southall, Jason Hockman

Papers

This paper addresses the topic of note, cut and strike detection in Irish traditional music (ITM). In order to do this we first evaluate state of the art onset detection methods for identifying note boundaries. Our method utilises the results from manually and automatically segmented flute recordings. We then demonstrate how this information may be utilised for the detection of notes and single note articulations idiomatic of this genre for the purposes of player style identification. Results for manually annotated onsets achieve 86%, 70% and 74% accuracies for note, cut and strike classification respectively. Results for automatically segmented recordings are …

Closed Patterns In Folk Music And Other Genres, Iris Yuping Ren

Papers

In this extended abstract, we would like to present the concept of the ‘closed pattern’ from computer science and use it to investigate patterns in folk music. We also show how the quantity of patterns can be different comparing to other genres. We use three symbolic music databases: The Essen Folksong Collection (Schaffrath & Huron, 1995), The Jazz Tune Collection (Rodr´ıguez L´opez et al., 2015), and Bach’s chorales (Sapp, 2005).

Formalising Cross-Cultural Vocal Production, Polina Proutskova, Christophe Rhodes, Tim Crawford, Geraint Wiggins

Papers

No abstract provided.

Segmentation Of Folk Songs With A Probabilistic Model, Ciril Bohak, Matija Marolt

Papers

Structure is an important aspect of music. Musical structure can be recognized in different musical modalities such as rhythm, melody, harmony or lyrics and plays a crucial role in our appreciation of music. In recent years many researchers have addressed the problem of music segmentation, mainly for popular and classical music. Some of the more recent approaches are Mauch et al. (2009), Foote (2000), Serr`a et al. (2012) and McFee & Ellis (2014). Last three are included in the music structure analysis framework MSAF Nieto & Bello (2015). None of the mentioned approaches however, addresses the specifics of folk music. …

A Search Through Time: Connecting Live Playing To Archive Recordings Of Traditional Music, Bryan Duggan, Jianghan Xu, Lise Denbrok, Breandan Knowlton

Papers

This poster describes new developments in the popular Tunepal project. Tunepal is a query-by-playing music score search engine used primarily by musicians on smartphones in traditional music sessions and classes. Using Tunepal, a musician can quickly identify the name of a melody being played and download the score for later study. Since 2009, there has also been a version of Tunepal that runs in a web browser that allows a musician to play a tune extract and find the name of the tune. Over the summer of 2015, we embarked on a project to redevelop the Tunepal website in HTML5. …

Neomi: A New Environment For The Organization Of Musical Instruments, Carolien Hulshof, Xavier Siebert, Hadrien Melot

Papers

No abstract provided.

Publishing The James Goodman Irish Music Manuscript Collection: How Modern Technology Facilitated The Editors' Task, Lisa Shields

Papers

The paper gives a description of an important mid nineteenth-century manuscript Irish music collection. It outlines the history of the edition and the work involved. The use of modern technology in the editorial process is considered. Undoubtedly these technological advances have been very helpful. However, they have also enlarged the scope of the project, creating new kinds of work which are seen as adding value to the product.

A Graph-Theoretical Approach To The Harmonic Analysis Of Georgian Vocal Polyphonic Music, Frank Scherbaum, Simha Arom, Frank Kane

Papers

The present paper proposes a computational approach to the comparative analysis and visualization of the harmonic structure of three-voiced vocal music. The dataset which has been used in this study is the same as in Scherbaum et al. (2015), a corpus of polyphonic songs from Svaneti (Akhobadze, 1957). Similar to the earlier work, a song is treated as a discrete temporal process in which harmonic or melodic states change according to unknown rules which are implicitely contained in the song itself. In contrast to the prior study, however, there are no assumptions regarding their probabilistic or deterministic nature.

Towards Flamenco Style Recognition: The Challenge Of Modelling The Aficionado, Nadine Kroher, José-Miguel Díaz-Báñez

Papers

No abstract provided.

After The Harmonie Universelle By Marin Mersenne (1636), What Fingering For The Chabrette In 2016?, Philippe Randonneix

Papers

No abstract provided.

The Georgian Musical System, Malkhaz Erkvanidze

Papers

No abstract provided.

A Revaluation Of Learning Practices In Indian Classical Music Using Technological Tools, Julien Debove, Dorian Cazau, Olivier Adam

Papers

Each khyāl performance of Indian classical music is unique and unreproducible because it is mainly based on improvisation. As for most orally transmitted musical repertoires, learning practices are essential as they guarantee that the musical codes are properly reproduced from one generation to another. In Indian classical music, practice, tightly imbricated in the pupil – teacher relation, favors clearly the imitation. Students tend to reproduce more or less successfully their master’s style. That’s why in order to be creative, it is necessary that each musician develops his own skills of understanding, experimentation and invention. Today, technological tools have considerably transformed …

A Method For Structural Analysis Of Ottoman-Turkish Makam Music Scores, Sertan Senturk, Xavier Serra

Papers

From a computational perspective, structural analysis of Ottoman- Turkish makam music (OTMM) is a research topic that has not been addressed thoroughly. In this paper we propose a method, which processes machine-readable music scores of OTMM to extract and semiotically describe the melodic and lyrical organization of the music piece automatically using basic string similarity and graph analysis techniques. The proposed method is used to identify around 50000 phrases in 1300 music scores and 21500 sections in 1770 scores, respectively. The obtained information may be useful for relevant research in music education and musicology, and it has already been used …

Constructing Proximity Graphs To Explore Similarities In Large-Scale Melodic Datasets, Chris Walshaw

Papers

This paper investigates the construction of proximity graphs in order to allow users to explore similarities in melodic datasets. A key part of this investigation is the use of a multilevel framework for measuring similarity in symbolic musical representations. The basis of the framework is straightforward: initially each tune is normalised and then recursively coarsened, typically by removing weaker off-beats, until the tune is reduced to a skeleton representation with just one note per bar. Melodic matching can then take place at every level: the multilevel matching implemented here uses recursive variants of local alignment algorithms, but in principle a …

On The Benefit Of Larynx-Microphone Field Recordings For The Documentation And Analysis Of Polyphonic Vocal Music, Frank Scherbaum

Papers

In a previous study Scherbaum et al. (2015) have demonstrated that recordings of body vibrations during singing contain all the essential information of a singer ́s voice regarding pitch, intonation, and voice intensity, but are practically unaffected by the voices of other singers (except for extreme situations). This allows the recording of the contribution of each singer while they are singing together. Because of these characteristics, Scherbaum et al. (2015) proposed the utilization of body vibrations recorded as an additional source of information for the documentation and analysis of traditional polyphonic vocal music. Questions remained, however, regarding the applicability of …

A Pattern Mining Approach To Study A Collection Of Dutch Folk-Songs, Peter Van Kranenburg, Darrell Conklin

Papers

No abstract provided.

Automatic Alignment Of Long Syllables In A Cappella Beijing Opera, Georgi Dzhambazov, Yile Yang, Rafael Caro Repetto, Xavier Serra

Papers

In this study we propose how to modify a standard approach for text-to-speech alignment to apply in the case of alignment of lyrics and singing voice. We model phoneme durations by means of a duration-explicit hidden Markov model (DHMM) phonetic recognizer based on MFCCs. The phoneme durations are empirically set in a probabilistic way, based on prior knowledge about the lyrics structure and metric principles, specific for the Beijing opera music tradition. Phoneme models are GMMs trained directly on a small corpus of annotated singing voice. The alignment is evaluated on a cappella material from Beijing opera, which is characterized …

Analysis Of Tahreer In Traditional Iranian Singing, Parham Bahadoran

Papers

Iranian tradition singing is based on a rich musical heritage and contains styles and techniques distinct to the region, which differentiate it from other styles of Middle Eastern singing. In this paper I aim to highlight the specific characteristics of a traditional Iranian vocal technique called Tahreer by analysing its features using computational tools and methods.

Proceedings Of The 6th International Workshop On Folk Music Analysis, 15-17 June, 2016, Pierre Beauguitte, Bryan Duggan, John D. Kelleher

Papers

The Folk Music Analysis Workshop brings together computational music analysis and ethnomusicology. Both symbolic and audio representations of music are considered, with a broad range of scientific approaches being applied (signal processing, graph theory, deep learning). The workshop features a range of interesting talks from international researchers in areas such as Indian classical music, Iranian singing, Ottoman-Turkish Makam music scores, Flamenco singing, Irish traditional music, Georgian traditional music and Dutch folk songs. Invited guest speakers were Anja Volk, Utrecht University and Peter Browne, Technological University Dublin.

Human Pattern Recognition In Data Sonification, Charlie Cullen, William Coleman

Papers

Computational music analysis investigates the relevant features required for the detection and classification of musical content, features which do not always directly overlap with musical composition concepts. Human perception of music is also an active area of research, with existing work considering the role of perceptual schema in musical pattern recognition. Data sonification investigates the use of non-speech audio to convey information, and it is in this context that some potential guidelines for human pattern recognition are presented for discussion in this paper. Previous research into the role of musical contour (shape) in data sonification shows that it has a …

Detection Of Melodic Patterns In Automatic Transcriptions Of Flamenco Singing, Aggelos Pikrakis, Nadine Kroher, José-Miguel Díaz-Báñez

Papers

The spontaneous expressive interpretation of melodic templates is a fundamental concept in flamenco music. Consequently, the automatic detection of such patterns in music collections sets the basis for a number of challenging analysis and retrieval tasks. We present a novel algorithm for the automatic detection of manually defined melodies within a corpus of automatic transcriptions of flamenco recordings. We evaluate the performance on the example of five characteristic patterns from the fandango de Valverde style and demonstrate that the algorithm is capable of retrieving ornamented instances of query patterns. Furthermore, we discuss limitations, possible extensions and applications of the proposed …