O uso idiomático dos instrumentos de percussão brasileiros: principais sistemas notacionais para o pandeiro brasileiro

This article adresses the idiomatic use of Brazilian percussion instruments and their notation on compositions. It uses the Brazilian "pandeiro", which is the principal instrument of this category, to make a technical and comparative analysis of the two main notational systems for this instrument, which are the models developed by Luiz D'Anunciacao and the other by Carlos Stasi. It also includes suggestions to help the development of this notation. It gives a list and description of several method books that could help percussionists, composers and arrangers to deepen their knowledge of Brazilian percussion.

On the writer identification in old handwritten music scores

Report for the scientific sojourn at the University of Bern, Swiss, from Mars until June 2008. Writer identification consists in determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. Even though an important amount of compositions contains handwritten text in the music scores, the aim of the work is to use only music notation to determine the author. It’s been developed two approaches for writer identification in old handwritten music scores. The methods proposed extract features from every music line, and also features from a texture image of music symbols. First of all, the music sheet is first preprocessed for obtaining a binarized music score without the staff lines. The classification is performed using a k-NN classifier based on Euclidean distance. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving encouraging identification rates.

Skill Development in Music Reading. The Eye-Movement Approach

This dissertation examined skill development in music reading by focusing on the visual processing of music notation in different music-reading tasks. Each of the three experiments of this dissertation addressed one of the three types of music reading: (i) sight-reading, i.e. reading and performing completely unknown music, (ii) rehearsed reading, during which the performer is already familiar with the music being played, and (iii) silent reading with no performance requirements. The use of the eye-tracking methodology allowed the recording of the readers’ eye movements from the time of music reading with extreme precision. Due to the lack of coherence in the smallish amount of prior studies on eye movements in music reading, the dissertation also had a heavy methodological emphasis. The present dissertation thus aimed to promote two major issues: (1) it investigated the eye-movement indicators of skill and skill development in sight-reading, rehearsed reading and silent reading, and (2) developed and tested suitable methods that can be used by future studies on the topic. Experiment I focused on the eye-movement behaviour of adults during their first steps of learning to read music notation. The longitudinal experiment spanned a nine-month long music-training period, during which 49 participants (university students taking part in a compulsory music course) sight-read and performed a series of simple melodies in three measurement sessions. Participants with no musical background were entitled as “novices”, whereas “amateurs” had had musical training prior to the experiment. The main issue of interest was the changes in the novices’ eye movements and performances across the measurements while the amateurs offered a point of reference for the assessment of the novices’ development. The experiment showed that the novices tended to sight-read in a more stepwise fashion than the amateurs, the latter group manifesting more back-and-forth eye movements. The novices’ skill development was reflected by the faster identification of note symbols involved in larger melodic intervals. Across the measurements, the novices also began to show sensitivity to the melodies’ metrical structure, which the amateurs demonstrated from the very beginning. The stimulus melodies consisted of quarter notes, making the effects of meter and larger melodic intervals distinguishable from effects caused by, say, different rhythmic patterns. Experiment II explored the eye movements of 40 experienced musicians (music education students and music performance students) during temporally controlled rehearsed reading. This cross-sectional experiment focused on the eye-movement effects of one-bar-long melodic alterations placed within a familiar melody. The synchronizing of the performance and eye-movement recordings enabled the investigation of the eye-hand span, i.e., the temporal gap between a performed note and the point of gaze. The eye-hand span was typically found to remain around one second. Music performance students demonstrated increased professing efficiency by their shorter average fixation durations as well as in the two examined eye-hand span measures: these participants used larger eye-hand spans more frequently and inspected more of the musical score during the performance of one metrical beat than students of music education. Although all participants produced performances almost indistinguishable in terms of their auditory characteristics, the altered bars indeed affected the reading of the score: the general effects of expertise in terms of the two eye- hand span measures, demonstrated by the music performance students, disappeared in the face of the melodic alterations. Experiment III was a longitudinal experiment designed to examine the differences between adult novice and amateur musicians’ silent reading of music notation, as well as the changes the 49 participants manifested during a nine-month long music course. From a methodological perspective, an opening to research on eye movements in music reading was the inclusion of a verbal protocol in the research design: after viewing the musical image, the readers were asked to describe what they had seen. A two-way categorization for verbal descriptions was developed in order to assess the quality of extracted musical information. More extensive musical background was related to shorter average fixation duration, more linear scanning of the musical image, and more sophisticated verbal descriptions of the music in question. No apparent effects of skill development were observed for the novice music readers alone, but all participants improved their verbal descriptions towards the last measurement. Apart from the background-related differences between groups of participants, combining verbal and eye-movement data in a cluster analysis identified three styles of silent reading. The finding demonstrated individual differences in how the freely defined silent-reading task was approached. This dissertation is among the first presentations of a series of experiments systematically addressing the visual processing of music notation in various types of music-reading tasks and focusing especially on the eye-movement indicators of developing music-reading skill. Overall, the experiments demonstrate that the music-reading processes are affected not only by “top-down” factors, such as musical background, but also by the “bottom-up” effects of specific features of music notation, such as pitch heights, metrical division, rhythmic patterns and unexpected melodic events. From a methodological perspective, the experiments emphasize the importance of systematic stimulus design, temporal control during performance tasks, and the development of complementary methods, for easing the interpretation of the eye-movement data. To conclude, this dissertation suggests that advances in comprehending the cognitive aspects of music reading, the nature of expertise in this musical task, and the development of educational tools can be attained through the systematic application of the eye-tracking methodology also in this specific domain.

On the use of textural features for writer identification in old handwritten music scores

Writer identification consists in determining the writer of a piece of handwriting from a set of writers. In this paper we present a system for writer identification in old handwritten music scores which uses only music notation to determine the author. The steps of the proposed system are the following. First of all, the music sheet is preprocessed for obtaining a music score without the staff lines. Afterwards, four different methods for generating texture images from music symbols are applied. Every approach uses a different spatial variation when combining the music symbols to generate the textures. Finally, Gabor filters and Grey-scale Co-ocurrence matrices are used to obtain the features. The classification is performed using a k-NN classifier based on Euclidean distance. The proposed method has been tested on a database of old music scores from the 17th to 19th centuries, achieving encouraging identification rates.

Recognition of online handwritten music symbols

Paper submitted to MML 2013, 6th International Workshop on Machine Learning and Music, Prague, September 23, 2013.

Partitura de luz: a representação criativa como perspectiva educacional

Este projecto de investigação teve como objectivo avaliar - através de uma série de workshops orientados pela mestranda no Centro Cultural de Belém em Abril de 2012 - o impacto da utilização de notação musical não-convencional num contexto não escolar. Traçando possíveis paralelos com o ensino especializado da música, propuseram-se metodologias de aprendizagem que permitissem a introdução da notação, de forma inovadora, no referido contexto escolar. O processo de investigação baseou-se em observação directa, na análise dos questionários preenchidos pelos participantes dos workshops e na observação e análise das gravações em vídeo que documentaram o processo artístico, pedagógico e de investigação. Numa sala escura, 6 retroprojectores projectaram uma Partitura de Luz. Entre crianças e adultos, 120 participantes (não-músicos) criaram empiricamente as suas composições, moldando o som em função da forma e a forma em função do som. O resultado foi compensador: a criação de condições favoráveis ao desenvolvimento máximo da expressão criativa individual ou colectiva dos participantes - através da utilização irrestrita de símbolos, imagens, objectos e matérias - culminou num efectivo estabelecimento de correspondência musical, a partir de recursos vocais. Este projecto, “Partitura de Luz”, foi uma oportunidade de relacionar a vertente artística – musical, plástica e gráfica - com a vertente humana: pedagógica e social.

Aprendizagem da lecto-escrita musical ao piano: um diálogo com a psicogênese da língua escrita

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

O desafio de desenvolver artistas criativos no mundo das mídias digitais

From the second half of the twentieth century, with the proposal of working active listening, exploring sounds, the experience, the search for new forms of contemporary music notation, improvisation and experimental music composition, arise music educators Paynter Schafer and Koellreutter, known by the active method of second generation who contributed greatly to the development of creative processes in the classroom. Also arises, in the same period, the encounter between art and technology, expanding opportunities through digital media, open, participatory and interactive works such as Video art, Web art, Nanoarte and Locative Art, augmented, not only against the art with the public, through connections mediated by digital interfaces, providing new learning situations attractive for the development of creativity and artistic production as challenges in contemporary.

The music-dramas of Richard Wagner, with the leading motives in notation.

No more published?

Avoiding staff removal stage in optical music recognition: application to scores written in white mensural notation

Staff detection and removal is one of the most important issues in optical music recognition (OMR) tasks since common approaches for symbol detection and classification are based on this process. Due to its complexity, staff detection and removal is often inaccurate, leading to a great number of errors in posterior stages. For this reason, a new approach that avoids this stage is proposed in this paper, which is expected to overcome these drawbacks. Our approach is put into practice in a case of study focused on scores written in white mensural notation. Symbol detection is performed by using the vertical projection of the staves. The cross-correlation operator for template matching is used at the classification stage. The goodness of our proposal is shown in an experiment in which our proposal attains an extraction rate of 96 % and a classification rate of 92 %, on average. The results found have reinforced the idea of pursuing a new research line in OMR systems without the need of the removal of staff lines.

Pandeiro-tekniikkaa perinteisessä sambassa ja uudemmassa populaarimusiikissa

Tavoitteeni opinnäytetyössä on esitellä erilaisia pandeiron soittotyylejä. Perinteisen tavan lisäksi esittelen uudemman tyylin, jota nimitän Suzano-tekniikaksi, joka muodostaa suuren osan työstä. Selvitän myös pandeiron käyttömahdollisuuksia populaarimusiikissa. Lisäksi selvitän tietoa pandeiro -soittimesta muille soittajille, sillä se on vielä varsin vieras soitin Suomessa. Työhöni olen kerännyt erilaista tietoa, mitä olen lukenut, kuullut ja nähnyt. Tieto on siis pääosin jo olemassa ollutta, mutta sen analysoiminen, kokoaminen yhteen ja yleisellä tasolla tietoon saattaminen ja esimerkkien avulla havainnollistaminen tuo mielestäni uutta tietoa pandeiron soitosta. Työni sisältääkin paljon nuottiesimerkkejä. Koska kyseessä on etninen soitin, on tärkeää tutustuttaa lukija myös soittimen rakenteeseen ja alkuperään. Työssä esittelen myös joitain yleisimpiä Koillis-Brasilian rytmejä, sillä brasilialaisessa populaarimusiikissa käytetään paljon elementtejä vanhoista ja perinteisistä rytmeistä. Tähän osioon olen valinnut sekä rumpusettityylisiä komppeja että lyömäsoitinfunktiossa olevia rytmejä, joilla täydennetään komppipohjaa. Työssä on myös mukana joitain ajatuksia pandeiron harjoitteluun. Olen suunnitellut harjoituksia pandeirolle käyttäen apuna tavallisia rumpukirjoja. Työhöni olen liittänyt DVD-levyn havainnollistamaan esimerkkejä, sillä pelkän kuulokuvan perusteella asiaan perehtymättömän on mahdotonta tietää, miten rytmit on soitettu.

Sight-singing from the established notation in a series of lessons and exercises on the tonic principle /

Includes index.

Music, cantelenas, songs, etc., from an early fifteenth century manuscript ...

"Twelve of these songs are in English and four in French."

Katei ongaku kokin zokkyoku zenshū. Collection of Japanese popular music.

Individual song titles in romanized form also.