Music today is more ubiquitous, accessible, and democratized than ever. Thanks to technologies such as high-end home studios, audio compression, and digital distribution, music now surrounds us in everyday life, almost every piece of music is a few minutes of download away, and almost any western musician, novice or expert, can compose, perform and distribute their music directly to their listeners from their home studios. But at the same time these technologies lead to some concerning social effects on the culture of consuming and creating music. Although music is available for more people, in more locations, and for longer periods of time, most listeners experience it in an incidental, unengaged, or utilitarian manner. On the creation side, home studios promote private and isolated practice of music making where hardly any musical instruments or even musicians are needed, and where the value of live

Extreme events such as natural or technological disasters challenge society's capabilities for planning and response. While advanced technologies and modeling techniques continue to expand how society can limit and manage extreme events, flexibility and an ability to improvise remain crucial in responding to them. By analyzing a case from the response to the 2001 World Trade Center attack, this paper develops a set of requirements for computer-based systems intended to support improvisation in response to extreme events. The particular goal of this analysis is to identify methods for providing cognitive-level support for organizations in determining when and how to improvise. Key Words Extreme Events, Improvisation, Emergency Response To appear in Decision Support Systems 323 Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd, Newark, NJ 07102. Email: mendonca@njit.edu 1

an important factor for musical segmentation, there have been relatively few systematic attempts to describe exactly how it affects grouping processes. The main problem is that musical parallelism itself is difficult to formalize. In this study, a computational model that extracts melodic patterns from a given melodic surface is presented. Following the assumption that the beginning and ending points of “significant ” repeating musical patterns influence the segmentation of a musical surface, the discovered patterns are used as ameans to determine probable segmentation points of the melody. “Significant ” patterns are defined primarily in terms of frequency of occurrence and length of pattern. The special status of nonoverlapping, immediately repeating patterns is examined. All the discovered patterns merge into a single “pattern ” segmentation profile that signifies points in the surface most likely to be perceived as points of segmentation. The effectiveness of the proposed melodic representations and algorithms is tested against a series of melodic surfaces illustrating both strengths and weaknesses of the approach.

This paper addresses the issue of music as a communication medium in auditory humancomputer interfaces. So far, psychoacoustics has had a great influence on the development of auditory interfaces, directly and through music cognition. We suggest that a better understanding of the processes involved in the perception of actual musical excerpts should allow musical auditory interface designers to exploit the communicative potential of music. In this respect, we argue that the real advantage of music as a communication medium relies on the richness of its specifically musical meanings rather than on its formal structure. Finally, we propose a method for automating the design of musical auditory interfaces, in order to make this design possible to non-musician designers.

We address the problem of musical variation (identification of different musical sequences as variations) and its implications for mental representations of music. According to reductionist theories, listeners judge the structural importance of musical events while forming mental representations. These judgments may result from the production of reduced memory representations that retain only the musical gist. In a study of improvised music performance, pianists produced variations on melodies. Analyses of the musical events retained across variations provided support for the reductionist account of structural importance. A neural network trained to produce reduced memory representations for the same melodies represented structurally important events more efficiently than others. Agreement among the musicians' improvisations, the network model, and music-theoretic predictions suggest that perceived constancy across musical variation is a natural result of a reductionist mechanism for p...

The iltur system features a novel method of interaction between expert and novice musicians through a set of musical controllers called Beatbugs. Beatbug players can record live musical input from MIDI and acoustic instruments and respond by transforming the recorded material in real-time, creating motif-and-variation call-and-response routines on the fly. A central computer system analyzes MIDI and audio played by expert players and allows novice Beatbug players to personalize the analyzed material using a variety of transformation algorithms. This paper presents the motivation for developing the iltur system, followed by a brief survey of pervious and related work that guided the definition of the project’s goals. We then present the hardware and software approaches that were taken to address these goals, as well as a couple of compositions that were written for the system. The paper ends with a discussion based on observations of players using the iltur system and a number of suggestions for future work.

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In this paper we introduce the idea of Knowledge Representation in the context of Artificial Intelligence. We explain why finding a good representation is an important issue in Artificial Intelligence research, and why music raises some particularly interesting questions. We then proceed to explain our own system for music knowledge representation, Charm.

This paper addresses the issue of music as a communication medium in auditory humancomputer interfaces. So far, psychoacoustics has had a great influence on the development of auditory interfaces, directly and through music cognition. We suggest that a better understanding of the processes involved in the perception of actual musical excerpts should allow musical auditory interface designers to exploit the communicative potential of music. In this respect, we argue that the real advantage of music as a communication medium relies on the richness of its specifically musical meanings rather than on its formal structure. Finally, we propose a method for automating the design of musical auditory interfaces, in order to make this design possible to non-musician designers.