A question of a voice: with what voice will I cry my sad fado?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Music Learning Tools for Android Devices

In this paper, a musical learning application for mobile devices is presented. The main objective is to design and develop an application capable of offering exercises to practice and improve a selection of music skills, to users interested in music learning and training. The selected music skills are rhythm, melodic dictation and singing. The application includes an audio signal analysis system implemented making use of the Goertzel algorithm which is employed in singing exercises to check if the user sings the right musical note. This application also includes a graphical interface to represent musical symbols. A set of tests were conducted to check the usefulness of the application as musical learning tool. A group of users with different music knowledge have tested the system and reported to have found it effective, easy and accessible.

Colombian Jazz dance suite : a synthesis of the music of the colombian andes and modern jazz

This thesis is an attempt to unite two distinct and dissimilar musical genres, the music of the Colombian Andes and modem jazz. The compositions to be analyzed in this thesis are meant to function as parts of a whole. Thus, they will be linked by thematic and rhythmic material. In their entirety the pieces will form a suite of dances not unlike those of Baroque composers, with titles that denote the name of the particular air being employed by the composer, who is also the author of this thesis. These individual dances are orchestrated for a jazz ensemble consisting of piano, string bass, drums, alto saxophone, and guitar. The rhythmic underpinning of this work is inspired by the folk music of Colombia and the harmonic content will be derived from the jazz idiom. The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate the possible product of the fusion of musical disciplines that are on the surface in no way related. This thesis will also attempt to show an example of how cultures can meld socio-artistically.

iGrooving: A Generative Music Mobile Application for Runners

iGrooving is a generative music mobile application specifically designed for runners. The application’s foundation is a step-counter that is programmed using the iPhone’s built-in accelerometer. The runner’s steps generate the tempo of the performance by mapping each step to trigger a kick-drum sound file. Additionally, different sound files are triggered at specific step counts to generate the musical performance, allowing the runner a level of compositional autonomy. The sonic elements are chosen to promote a meditative aspect of running. iGrooving is conceived as a biofeedback-stimulated musical instrument and an environment for creating generative music processes with everyday technologies, inspiring us to rethink our everyday notions of musical performance as a shared experience. Isolation, dynamic changes, and music generation are detailed to show how iGrooving facilitates novel methods for music composition, performance and audience participation.

A dedicated greedy pursuit algorithm for sparse spectral representation of music sound

A dedicated algorithm for sparse spectral representation of music sound is presented. The goal is to enable the representation of a piece of music signal as a linear superposition of as few spectral components as possible, without affecting the quality of the reproduction. A representation of this nature is said to be sparse. In the present context sparsity is accomplished by greedy selection of the spectral components, from an overcomplete set called a dictionary. The proposed algorithm is tailored to be applied with trigonometric dictionaries. Its distinctive feature being that it avoids the need for the actual construction of the whole dictionary, by implementing the required operations via the fast Fourier transform. The achieved sparsity is theoretically equivalent to that rendered by the orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) method. The contribution of the proposed dedicated implementation is to extend the applicability of the standard OMP algorithm, by reducing its storage and computational demands. The suitability of the approach for producing sparse spectral representation is illustrated by comparison with the traditional method, in the line of the short time Fourier transform, involving only the corresponding orthonormal trigonometric basis.

Evolution of classifiers for pitch estimation of piano music using cartesian genetic programming

Pitch Estimation, also known as Fundamental Frequency (F0) estimation, has been a popular research topic for many years, and is still investigated nowadays. The goal of Pitch Estimation is to find the pitch or fundamental frequency of a digital recording of a speech or musical notes. It plays an important role, because it is the key to identify which notes are being played and at what time. Pitch Estimation of real instruments is a very hard task to address. Each instrument has its own physical characteristics, which reflects in different spectral characteristics. Furthermore, the recording conditions can vary from studio to studio and background noises must be considered. This dissertation presents a novel approach to the problem of Pitch Estimation, using Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP).We take advantage of evolutionary algorithms, in particular CGP, to explore and evolve complex mathematical functions that act as classifiers. These classifiers are used to identify piano notes pitches in an audio signal. To help us with the codification of the problem, we built a highly flexible CGP Toolbox, generic enough to encode different kind of programs. The encoded evolutionary algorithm is the one known as 1 + , and we can choose the value for . The toolbox is very simple to use. Settings such as the mutation probability, number of runs and generations are configurable. The cartesian representation of CGP can take multiple forms and it is able to encode function parameters. It is prepared to handle with different type of fitness functions: minimization of f(x) and maximization of f(x) and has a useful system of callbacks. We trained 61 classifiers corresponding to 61 piano notes. A training set of audio signals was used for each of the classifiers: half were signals with the same pitch as the classifier (true positive signals) and the other half were signals with different pitches (true negative signals). F-measure was used for the fitness function. Signals with the same pitch of the classifier that were correctly identified by the classifier, count as a true positives. Signals with the same pitch of the classifier that were not correctly identified by the classifier, count as a false negatives. Signals with different pitch of the classifier that were not identified by the classifier, count as a true negatives. Signals with different pitch of the classifier that were identified by the classifier, count as a false positives. Our first approach was to evolve classifiers for identifying artifical signals, created by mathematical functions: sine, sawtooth and square waves. Our function set is basically composed by filtering operations on vectors and by arithmetic operations with constants and vectors. All the classifiers correctly identified true positive signals and did not identify true negative signals. We then moved to real audio recordings. For testing the classifiers, we picked different audio signals from the ones used during the training phase. For a first approach, the obtained results were very promising, but could be improved. We have made slight changes to our approach and the number of false positives reduced 33%, compared to the first approach. We then applied the evolved classifiers to polyphonic audio signals, and the results indicate that our approach is a good starting point for addressing the problem of Pitch Estimation.

Portfolio of compositions with commentaries 2012-2015

This writing forms part of a portfolio of works which gathers together notations and recordings made between 2012 and 2015. The writing divides into four chapters. The first chapter undertakes an examination of abstraction. From the proposition obtained therein, that it is possible to extend within abstraction beyond a correspondence between its terms and concrete manifestations, I ask in what way abstraction may be considered to function therefrom. The second chapter performs an analysis of radical music notations from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. The central analysis identifies what is essentially an evolution of what I call ''figuration'' throughout three non-chronological phases of Christian Wolff's notations. The chapter closes by questioning what form of understanding might yet be pursued in respect of this work given (a) its nature, and (b) the nature of our inquiry. The third chapter reflects on some of the philosophical problematics raised in the preceding chapters, at the same time as it prepares for those that follow in the final chapter. The final chapter is a record of the development of my thought appertaining to my compositional work. It sets out two case studies (prepared piano and postcard notations) before proceeding to a selected set of commentaries. Finally, the notion of the functioning of written and acoustical ''marks'' developed in the preceding commentaries is generalised as I develop an aesthetics of scriptural experience.

Changing the servicescape : The influence of music, self-disclosure and eye gaze on service encounter experience and approach-avoidance behavior

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and understand the effect of a servicescape’s ambient and social conditions on consumers’ service encounter experience and their approach/avoidance behavior in a retail context. In three papers, with a total sample of over 1600 participants (including 550 actual consumers) and seven experiments, the author investigates the effect of music (ambient stimuli), employees’ self-disclosure (verbal social stimuli) and employees’ gazing behavior (nonverbal social stimuli) on consumers’ service encounter experience and approach/avoidance behavior in a retail store. Paper I comprised two experiments, and the aim was to investigate the influence of music on emotions, approach/avoidance behavior. Paper II comprised two experiments, and the aim was to investigate the effect of frontline employees’ personal self-disclosure on consumers’ reciprocal behavior. Paper III comprised three experiments, and the aim was to investigate the influence of employee’s direct eye gaze/ averted eye gaze on consumer emotions, social impression of the frontline employee and encounter satisfaction in different purchase situations. The results in this thesis show that music affects consumers in both positive and negative ways (Paper I). Self-disclosure affects consumers negatively, in such a way that it decreases encounter satisfaction  (Paper II) and, finally, eye gaze affects consumers by regulating both positively – and in some cases also negatively – consumers’ social impression of the frontline employee and their encounter satisfaction (Paper III). The conclusions of this thesis are that both ambient and social stimuli in a servicescape affect consumers’ internal responses, which in turn affect their behavior. Depending on the purchase situation, type of retail, and stimuli, the internal and behavioral responses are different.

Pathfinder. Performance at the Sonorities Festival of Contemporary Music 2016

Pathfinder (2016) is an audiovisual performance-game for a solo drummer,exploring the synergies between multiple contemporary creative practices.The work navigates between music composition, improvisation, projection/ light art and game art. At its heart lies a bespoke electro-acoustic instrument,the augmented drum-kit, used not only to provide the sonic content of the work in real-time, but also as a highly expressive game controller that interacts with an instrument-specific game. The musical instrument offers a much wider range of expressive possibilities, control and tactile feedback in comparison to a traditional general-purpose game controller, and as a result it affords a very diverse and nuanced gameplay performance. Live electronics, lights, projections and the drum-kit all make up the performance-game’s universe, within which the performer has to explore, adjust, navigate and complete a journey.

Implémentation sur FPGA de l’algorithme MUSIC sur antenne-réseau expérimentale à 10 GHz

Les techniques des directions d’arrivée (DOA) sont une voie prometteuse pour accroitre la capacité des systèmes et les services de télécommunications en permettant de mieux estimer le canal radio-mobile. Elles permettent aussi de suivre précisément des usagers cellulaires pour orienter les faisceaux d’antennes dans leur direction. S’inscrivant dans ce contexte, ce présent mémoire décrit étape par étape l’implémentation de l’algorithme de haut niveau MUSIC (MUltiple SIgnal Classification) sur une plateforme FPGA afin de déterminer en temps réel l’angle d’arrivée d’une ou des sources incidentes à un réseau d’antennes. Le concept du prototypage rapide des lois de commande (RCP) avec les outils de XilinxTM System generator (XSG) et du MBDK (Model Based Design Kit) de NutaqTM est le concept de développement utilisé. Ce concept se base sur une programmation de code haut niveau à travers des modèles, pour générer automatiquement un code de bas niveau. Une attention particulière est portée sur la méthode choisie pour résoudre le problème de la décomposition en valeurs et vecteurs propres de la matrice complexe de covariance par l’algorithme de Jacobi. L’architecture mise en place implémentant cette dernière dans le FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) est détaillée. Par ailleurs, il est prouvé que MUSIC ne peut effectuer une estimation intéressante de la position des sources sans une calibration préalable du réseau d’antennes. Ainsi, la technique de calibration par matrice G utilisée dans ce projet est présentée, en plus de son modèle d’implémentation. Enfin, les résultats expérimentaux du système mis à l’épreuve dans un environnement réel en présence d’une source puis de deux sources fortement corrélées sont illustrés et analysés.

Music copyright in the digital age: creators, commerce and copyright - an empirical study of the UK music copyright industries

Copyright markets, it is said, are ‘winner takes all’ markets favouring the interests of corporate investors over the interests of primary creators. However, little is known about popular music creators’ ‘lived experience’ of copyright. This thesis interrogates key aspects of copyright transactions between creators and investors operating in the UK music industries using analysis of various copyright related documents and semi-structured interviews with creators and investors. The research found considerable variety in the types of ‘deal’ creators enter into and considerable divergence in the potential rewards. It was observed that new-entrant creators have little comprehension of the basic tenets of copyright, but with experience they become more ‘copyright aware’. Documentary and interview evidence reveals creators routinely assign copyright to third party investors for the full term of copyright in sound recordings: the justification for this is questionable. An almost inevitable consequence of this asymmetry of understanding of copyright and asymmetry of bargaining power is that creators become alienated from their copyright works. The empirical evidence presented here supports historic and contemporary calls for a statutory mechanism limiting the maximum copyright assignment period to ten-years.

Interspeech and identity on discourse about letter of country music manner Ferreirinha

This article has a purpose to study the interspeech on discourse about letter of country music. Since the beginning, we emphasize that, although there is interdependence between letter and melody, according Tatit (1996), we will privilege the discourse about letter. It is grounded by the contribution methodological - theorist of speech analysis, more specifically about the postulate enunciation-discursive from Maingueneau (2008), we start from presupposition about the interspeech, which has a strait relation with the discursive memory, shows features about the enunciator identity. Like object focus of analysis, we select the letter named Ferreirinha, who is considered a classical to be one of the most remembered and known by the people. It was made at the 50´s decade, this speech has a very strong representation, mainly at the Midwest and Southeast region from Brazil, they´re considered the crib of the culture from the hayseed man. The result shows us that the interspeech includes discourses that compound the discursive memory from rural migrant, showing their discursive identity.