The traditional rules of voice-leading in Western music are explicated using experimentally established perceptual principles. Six core principles are shown to account for the majority of voice-leading rules given in historical and contemporary music theory tracts. These principles are treated in a manner akin to axioms in a formal system from which the traditional rules of voice-leading are derived. Nontraditional rules arising from the derivation are shown to predict formerly unnoticed aspects of voice-leading practice. In addition to the core perceptual principles, several auxiliary principles are described. These auxiliary principles are occasionally linked to voice-leading practice and may be regarded as compositional “options ” that shape the music-making in perceptually unique ways. It is suggested that these auxiliary principles distinguish different types of part writing, such as polyphony, homophony, and close harmony. A theory is proposed to account for the aesthetic origin of voiceleading practices.

This paper describes a system for the generation of jazz melodies over an input chord progression. A genetic algorithm was used to search through the space of possible solutions. A symbolic, as opposed to binary, approach with domain-specific reproduction operators was chosen because it allowed knowledge based constraints to be imposed on the search space. The objective, algorithmic fitness function as well as the domain-specific genetic operators orientate the search to promising musical paths.

The work described in this paper aims at developing a system that could perform expressive tempo transformations in monophonic instrument phrases. We have first developed a melodic description subsystem that extracts a set of acoustic features from monophonic recordings. This set of features is structured and stored following a description scheme that is derived from the current MPEG-7 standard. These performance descriptions are then compared with their corresponding scores, using edit distance techniques, for automatically annotating the expressive transformations performed by the musician. Then, these annotated performance descriptions are incorporated in a case-based reasoning (CBR) subsystem in order to build an expressive tempo transformations case base. The transformation subsystem will use this CBR system to perform tempo transformations in an expressive manner. Saxophone performances of jazz standards played by a professional performer have been recorded for this study. In this paper, we first describe which are the melodic features that have been extracted and how they are structured and stored. Then, we explain the analysis methods that have been implemented to extract this set of features from audio signals and how they are processed by the CBR subsystem. 1.

The content-based retrieval of Western music has received increasing attention recently. Much of this research deals with monophonic music. Polyphonic music is more common, but also more difficult to represent. Music information retrieval systems must extract viable features before they can define similarity measures. We summarize and categorize representation features that have been used for polyphonic retrieval with the aim of laying standardized groundwork for future feature extraction research. Comparisons with and extensions to monophonic approaches are given, and a new feature, an extension of duration-independent pitch slices, is proposed. Key words: Music retrieval, polyphonic features 1.

Research into the perception and cognition of music listening often contains implicit assumptions about the nature of the underlying mental representations, and about the relationship between "auditory processing" and "music perception". We attempt to highlight and problemitize some of these assumptions and to provide a more cognitively appropriate model for music perception and cognition, based on models from the field of Computational Auditory Scene Analysis. We provide initial evidence for the appropriateness of this model by describing several existing and novel auditory/musical phenomena. Finally, we describe some of the new questions such a model raises, and propose certain experiments which might be used to answer them. I. Introduction The goal of the field of music perception and cognition is to explain the human ability to map incoming acoustic data into emotional, music-theoretical, or other high-level cognitive representations, and to provide evidence from psychological ex...

A computer system is described which performs polyphonic transcription of known solo piano music by using high-level musical information to guide a signal-processing system. This process, which we term expressive performance extraction, maps a digital audio representation of a musical performance to a MIDI representation of the same performance using the score of the music as a guide. Analysis of the accuracy of the system is presented, and its usefulness both as a tool for music-psychology researchers and as an example of a musical-knowledgebased signal-processing system is discussed. 1 Introduction Traditionally, transcription systems (computer systems which can extract symbolic musical information from a digital-audio signal) have been built via signal processing from the bottom up. In this paper, we examine a method for performing a restricted form of transcription by using a high-level music-understanding system to inform and constrain a signal-processing algorithm. The goal of ...

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In recent years, the searching and indexing techniques for multimedia data are getting more attention in the area of multimedia databases. As many research works were done on the content-based retrieval of image and video data, less attention was received to the content-based retrieval of audio data. In this paper, we propose an approach to retrieve MP3 music objects based on their content. In our approach, the coefficients extracting from the output of the polyphase filters are used to compute the MP3 features for indexing the MP3 objects. We also propose an MP3 similarity measuring function to provide users the ability to approximately retrieve the desired MP3 objects. Experiments are performed and analyzed to show the efficiency and the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper reports on a system for musical information retrieval environments called SMILE. SMILE implements a methodology designed to cope with content-based musical retrieval. The innovation provided by the methodology is due to the synergic combination of sound information retrieval techniques and computer-based melodic surface extraction algorithms. The innovative corollary is that the latter extracts content-descriptive musical phrases from both documents and queries by thus permitting a clear separation between information being searched and indexes describing the semantic content. The information retrieval techniques are employed to index, retrieve, and rank by score the musical documents judged relevant to the final users' information need. Two types of retrieval functions are provided -- a querying function based on a virtual keyboard played by the user, and a browsing function to navigate an automatically constructed hyper-music which is made of documents and phrase...

Music structure is very important for semantic music understanding. We propose a novel approach for popular music structure detection. The proposed approach applies beat space segmentation, chord detection, singing voice boundary detection, melody and content based similarity region detection to music structure detection. A frequency scaling “Octave Scale ” is used to calculate Cepstral coefficients to represent the music content. The experiments illustrate that the proposed approach achieves better performance than existing methods. We also outline some applications which can use our refined music structural analysis.