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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

Understanding surprise is a key to the cognition of music, at all levels of musical structure: rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre. This paper addresses the modeling of surprise in particular music sequences: Jazz harmonic progressions. Most of the works in music cognition relate surprise to the phenomenon of musical expectation: a surprise is seen as something unexpected. Furthermore, unexpected more or less means "unheard before". In this paper, we emphasize the importance of the rich algebraic structure underlying Jazz chord sequences, and suggest that harmonic surprise may not only be related to unexpected structures, but also to "calculus", i.e. to an ability to deduce a sequence from a set of combinatorial rules. We first introduce the domain of Jazz chord sequences and describe its underlying algebraic structure, based on the notion of chord substitution. We then propose to use a statistical-based data compression approach to infer recurring patterns from the corpus, and show that this yields reasonable but limited expectation structures. We then propose a mechanism to induce chord substitution rules from the corpus, and comment its output according to the theory of chord substitution. Finally, we suggest that such a model of chord substitution rules may be used to devise richer models of harmonic surprise.

The author discusses research in music cognition and education indicating that novices and untrained students perceive and learn music in a fundamentally different manner than do expert musicians. Based on these studies, he suggests implementing high-level musical percepts and constructionist learning schemes in new expressive musical instruments that would provide thoughtful and joyful musical activities for novices and experts alike. The author describes several instruments---the Musical Playpen, Fireflies and Squeezables---that he has developed in an effort to provide novices with access to rich and meaningful musical experiences and recounts observations and interviews of subjects playing these instruments.

Music. Radio. The internet. Three very interesting fields which are linked in this project on internet radio stations. A comparative study of existing radio stations is performed. Weaknesses and problems in current internet radio stations, as exposed by the comparative study, are identified. We outline the general problems observed. In particular, focus is placed on automatic music selection. Our approach is based on the notions of music genre, popularity, repetition, catalogue coverage, style continuity and "music programme" generation. A simple internet radio station has already been implemented. The station serves as a platform to test our algorithms.

The XXth century is full of technological inventions that made the very idea of a listening device possible, from the early gramophones to the latest portable mini disk players. What evolutions can we predict for the listening devices of the future, and how these evolutions will change the way we access and listen to music? In this chapter, we suggest that listening devices can be greatly enhanced by providing new forms of user controls which provide users with semantically preserving variations. These controls are intended to allow listeners different musical perceptions on a piece of music, by opposition to traditional listening, in which the musical media is played passively by some neutral device. The objective is both to increase the musical comfort of listeners, and, when possible, to provide listeners with smoother paths to new music (music they do not know, or do not like). This chapter illustrates this idea on a few examples of active listening projects conducted at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, based on the notion of constrained exploratory space. These constrained spaces suggest that the classical boundaries between composing, listening and mixing may be redefined, thereby assigning new roles to composers, sound engineers and listeners.