Music Commons^™

Commencement Concert, June 10, 2016, Lawrence University

Conservatory of Music Concert Programs

Memorial Chapel

Composition Portfolio, Thomas Mcveety

Music ETDs

This manuscript is a collection of musical compositions written while I was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico. My portfolio contains composition synopses, musical scores and spectrograms and audio recordings. The compositions featured in the portfolio are Song of the Bisti, an improvised film score for electric cello and electronics; Four New Mexico Landscapes, for chamber ensemble; Phonemes, for alto saxophone and five string cello; and Requiem for an Ancient Forest, for wind symphony.

Advertisements; 2016-06-05, The Royal Serenaders Male Chorus

Advertisements for Events

No abstract provided.

Program; 2016-06-05, The Royal Serenaders Male Chorus

Concert & Event Programs

No abstract provided.

Visions, Lawrence University Symphonic Band, June 3, 2016, Lawrence University

Conservatory of Music Concert Programs

Memorial Chapel

Studio Magic: The Process, Value, And Ethics Of Remastering, Julian D. Anderson

Honors Projects

ABSTRACT

Due to the growth of recording technology, recorded music has become the most common form of music listening. Having high-fidelity audio is as important on audience perception of the music as the composition and the musical interpretation. As the process of recording and the final medium of the recording have advanced, the fidelity of the audio has increased, thus decreasing the listener’s awareness of the recording itself and bringing their attention to the music. However, older media is reparable to the extent that it can be remastered to decrease scrutiny on the product. What is worth remastering? What is …

Art As Display, Frank M. Boardman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Art is essentially a type of display. As an activity, art is what we do when we display objects with certain intentions. As a set of objects, art is all of those things that are displayed for those purposes. The artworld is the social atmosphere that surrounds this particular activity of display. And a history of art is an evolving narrative of change in the practice of this sort of display.

Specifically, to focus for convenience on art as a set of objects, this is what we can call the “displayed-object thesis”:

x is a work of art iff: (a) …

Charles Ives On The Nature Of Experience: The Compositional Designs And Aesthetic Programs Of Three Orchestral Works, Ashleé Michele Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Charles Ives on the Nature of Experience: The Compositional Designs and Aesthetic Programs of Three Orchestral Works explores the hypothesis that Ives set in motion in many of his compositions a juxtaposition of temporal process (such as polyrhythm and polymeter) with the aim of exploiting a person’s innate abilities to entrain. Ives believed participants engaged in a juxtaposition of temporal processes are able to form personalized experiences by choosing which elements to attend to.

I present three analyses to explore the potential for multiple entrainment experiences in three works by Ives: The Unanswered Question, Central Park in the Dark, and …

Die Meistersinger, New York City, And The Metropolitan Opera: The Intersection Of Art And Politics During Two World Wars, Gwen L. D'Amico

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In 1945, after a five-year hiatus, the Metropolitan Opera returned Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg to its stage. It had been the only one of Wagner’s operas that had been banned during World War II, ostensibly because of its German nationalism and association with the Third Reich. But was it the German nationalism or Wagner’s own anti-Semitism that caused the unease? What resounded with the audiences? World War II stands at an historic cross roads in the reception of Die Meistersinger in America. This is where the present day “problem” with this work begins. The Metropolitan Opera’s decision created …

Searching For Sounds: Instrumental Agency And Modularity In Electroacoustic Improvisation, Stephen (Red) Wierenga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In their radical departure from conventional instrumental technique and standardized instruments themselves, the practices of electroacoustic improvisation present a particular challenge to prevalent Western concepts of musical instruments. These concepts—which generally treat instruments as fixed objects—are ill-equipped to account for the ways in which electroacoustic improvisers foreground the agency of their instruments and abandon the quest for “mastery” typical especially of classical attitudes. Additionally, electroacoustic improvisers often approach instruments not as singular, self-contained, and static in their materiality, but rather as modular instrumentaria capable of myriad states and ever in flux, similarly problematizing conventional conceptions that view the physical constitutions …

Jazz Small Groups, Combos 3, 4, & 5, June 2, 2016, Lawrence University

Conservatory of Music Concert Programs

Harper Hall

Jazz Small Groups, Combos 1 & 2, June 1, 2016, Lawrence University

Conservatory of Music Concert Programs

Harper Hall

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 …

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

Papers

No abstract provided.

Revisiting Digital Sampling Rhetorics With An Ethic Of Care, Jared Sterling Colton

English Faculty Publications

Rhetoric and composition studies have conceptualized and defined digital sampling as a method of composition in many ways and for various pedagogical purposes: from a means of free-play invention that is critical of more formalistic writing practices to a semiotic strategy rooted in African American rhetorical traditions designed to effect political change. The latter view is critical of the former in that the former does not account for student digital sampling projects that unquestioningly appropriate from other people and communities. This is a real pedagogical problem, but students can create unethical and hurtful digital sampling projects, no matter the assignment …

Folk Music In A Digital Age: The Importance Of Face-To-Face Community Values In Filk Music, Sally Childs-Helton

Scholarship and Professional Work

Filk is broadly defined as the traditional folk-based music and related community created by and for a sub-community of science fiction and fantasy fans. Born in the 1950s, filk today includes international participants of various experience levels and musical styles. Social context and music are equally important in this tradition; prominent values include self-expression, play and building a face-to-face co-creative, collaborative group experience. This article, founded on Textual Poachers (1992), assumes that filk remains a folk music in many ways, and that filkers still prefer face-to-face musical and personal interaction in spite of a lively, diverse online filk community. I …

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 …

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

Papers

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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).

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. …

The Effects Of Musical Ensembles-In-Residence On Elementary Students’ Auditory Discrimination And Spatial Reasoning Skills: A Longitudinal Study, Daniel C. Johnson, Virginia Davis

School of Music Faculty Publications

The purpose of this longitudinal project was to investigate the effects of a program combining musical ensembles-in-residence with regular classroom music instruction on elementary students’ auditory discrimination and spatial intelligence scores. In combination with regular, sequential general music classes as part of their school curriculum, participants in the program received two half-hour lesson each week, from musical-ensembles-in-residence. These chamber ensembles provided aural models for reinforcing fundamental concepts for four consecutive years. Researchers collected data from a stratified, random sample of students in grades K-2 and 4-5 receiving the experimental program and demographically similar comparison schools, which did not receive any …

Concatenative Synthesis For Novel Timbral Creation, James Eric Bilous

Master's Theses

Modern day musicians rely on a variety of instruments for musical expression. Tones produced from electronic instruments have become almost as commonplace as those produced by traditional ones as evidenced by the plethora of artists who can be found composing and performing with nothing more than a personal computer. This desire to embrace technical innovation as a means to augment performance art has created a budding field in computer science that explores the creation and manipulation of sound for artistic purposes. One facet of this new frontier concerns timbral creation, or the development of new sounds with unique characteristics that …

Music And Language Development: Traits Of Nursery Rhymes And Their Impact On Children's Language Development, Ashley Lauren Gonzalez

Music

From birth--possibly even before birth--the amount and array of external stimuli profoundly affect a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. In addition to verbal communication from parent to child, singing proves to be an integral aid to a child’s development of speech and language, allegedly due to repetitions of words and rhythms. Nursery rhymes are, from infancy, among the most commonly presented forms of musical stimulus for children. The repetitive nature of the nursery rhymes undoubtedly supports language and speech development, but various characteristics of nursery rhymes, specifically pitch interval, meter, phrase length, contour, and harmony, also contribute substantially to the …

How To Make The Jailhouse Rock: An Evaluation Of Effective Music Therapy Methods Among Juvenile Offenders, Katelyn Rose Tomasello

Music

No abstract provided.

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.