Description Computer Science Colloquium Series
33 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

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Special Colloquium

Music Science and the Mathematical Modeling of Tonality: Lecture and Demonstration

Elaine Chew
University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering
2007-2008 Science Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~echew

Thursday, November 29, 2007
4:00PM
SPECIAL ROOM: Room 2, Music Building, North Yard, Harvard University
(Music building is located directly behind the Science Center at the corner of Kirkland and Oxford Streets)
http://www.music.fas.harvard.edu/parking.html
(Ice Cream at 3:15PM - 3:45PM, Maxwell Dworkin 2nd Floor Lounge Area)

Abstract
The surge in interest in the scientific study of music in recent years is evidenced by the burgeoning of new conferences and journals, such as the international conferences on sound and music computing, music information retrieval, and mathematics and computation in music, and the journal of mathematics and music. A growing group of researchers and scholars are employing mathematical and computational techniques in the scientific analysis and generation of music, compositions, and expressive performances. I shall briefly introduce open courseware I have developed for learning about these aspects of music and computation.

The main part of the talk will focus on mathematical models for recognizing and tracking tonality in music, with live demonstrations of the MuSA.RT real-time tonal analysis and visualization system. Tonality refers to the system by which pitches relate one to another to generate varying degrees of perceived stabilities amongst the pitches. Questions that pertain to tonality include: why does this phrase sound finished, and that one not? how does one create tension and release in a composition? what are some bases for musical humour? where in a piece should one stretch the time values of notes in an expressive performance to produce the desired emotional effect?

I shall motivate and introduce the Spiral Array, a geometric model for tonality first proposed in my dissertation, and related algorithms for tonal induction and segmentation. Musical illustrations will provide some answers to the above questions, with the help of the MuSA.RT system. The MuSA.RT project is joint work with Alexandre François, who will give a complementary talk in the Spring that will describe the underlying software architecture.

Host: Professor Patrick Wolfe

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