Read Bamberger, Jeanne (2004). The development of intuitive musical understanding: a natural experiment. Psychology of Music 30(1), pp. 7-36; available at http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/N560Site-Fall06/Bamberger-DevIMU.pdf. Then download Impromptu from http://www.tuneblocks.com/, and the "Mini-Text", a set of three short lessons, from http://www.tuneblocks.com/downloaddoc.do. To launch Impromptu, just open the downloaded Impromtu.jar file. NOTE: While Impromptu runs on any Windows or Macintosh OS X computer, it requires Java 1.4. Any Mac with a recent version of OS X (10.4.whatever), including those in the STCs, should be fine, but Windows machines may not be. Do just the first two Impromptu lessons, "Melodic Structure" and "Composing Melodies", as described in the Mini-Text, and write about your experience in some detail, as Linz and Becky did. You'll find that Impromptu's appearance and sounds are primitive, but that's not the point, of course.

Read the Wikipedia article Musical Acoustics. If you have time, also skim the IU Center for Electronic and Computer Music's An Acoustics Primer, which is far more detailed. There'll be nothing to turn in.

Try out everything in the "Introduction to R" tutorial. (This is the same tutorial that's on Chris Raphael's Web site; I decided to put a copy on mine and link to that.) There'll be nothing to turn in, but please make a note of anything you don't understand; before I start talking, I'll take a census of things the class is having trouble with so I can be sure to explain those clearly. You may as well install R on your own computer now, but if for some reason you don't want to, I'm told that the PCs in the STC in the Music Library already have it installed, which makes me think that all PCs in all STCs probably have it. And the tutorial asserts that computers in Informatics 109 "will" have R! (Unfortunately, like the Macs in M373, the Macs in STCs don't seem to have it.)

Send me a recording of one of your favorite pieces of music, or a piece that you think is really interesting. No holds barred; the wilder the variety, the better! To do this as efficiently as possible, get me an audio file in a standard format -- MP3, if possible; AAC is okay too -- by noon Tuesday. You can get it to me by e-mail, if it's not too large a file; by putting it on the Web or an FTP server in a place I can get to, and telling me how to get it; by giving me a CDROM containing it; or, if it's in the Music Library's Variations2 system, by telling me how to find it there. Also give me some information about the music, including (1) a title; (2) one or more (style) genres you personally think it belongs to, and the genre(s) you think or know it belongs to according to either All Music Guide (http://www.allmusic.com/) or iTunes (http://www.itunes.com/); and, if applicable and the information is available, (3) the composer(s), date of composition, performer(s), date of performance, and performance medium (e.g., solo kazoo, vocal quartet, turntabilism, software synthesis, etc.). Of course a lot of those items don't make sense for a lot of music. We'll listen to a minute or (hopefully) two of everyone's selection (we can start in the middle if you feel the beginning of the track doesn't get the idea across), and we'll briefly discuss each of them in terms of what characteristics it has that you could plausibly get a computer to recognize. This is required of those registered for credit, but everyone is encouraged to participate, including people sitting in and the instructor.

Read sections on psychoacoustics, pp. 315-329, from Chapter 10 of Pohlmann, Ken (2005). Principles of Digital Audio, Fifth Edition. The book is on reserve for the class, but this is the material handed out in class on Friday. Also, use Audacity to play around with these recorded musical instrument samples. The idea is mostly to familiarize yourself with Audacity, and also (to a lesser extent) with what complex acoustically-generated sounds are like if you look at and listen to them closely. As a minimum, open and listen to the oboe F4, oboe A4, and piano A4 files. Zoom in and out on the screen, and select and listen to bits of them, including looping (to do this, just hold down the shift key while clicking play). Finally, compare the complex real sound to some simple artificial sounds. Open a new file and paste about 0.2 sec. of the oboe A4 into it. Then use the first three commands in the Generate menu -- Silence, Tone, and White Noise -- to insert after the oboe excerpt 0.1 sec. of silence, then 0.2 sec. each of sine, square, and sawtooth wave A4's, then 0.2 sec. of white noise. Each pair of sounds should be separated by 0.1 sec. of silence, so the final sound is 1.4 sec. long, with this structure: [0.2 sec: oboe A4] [0.1 sec: silence] [0.2 sec: sine A4] [0.1 sec: silence] [0.2 sec: square A4] [0.1 sec: silence] [0.2 sec: sawtooth A4] [0.1 sec: silence] [0.2 sec: white noise] . Play around with views some more: zoom way in on the waveform till you can see the little oboe cycles, sines, squares, triangles, and, well, noisiness; change the vertical axis to dB and spectrum. Finally, export the final sound as a .wav, and e-mail it to me (it should be about 120K bytes). Audacity is already on all of the computers in the Music Library; you can also download it from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/, and it's well worth having it on your own computer.

Do this additive-synthesis assignment. It requires a Mac running OS X, definitely at least v. 10.3 and possibly 10.4.

Read Merton, Orren (2006, February). The Sum of All Tracks. Electronic Musician 22,2, pp. 57-63. (This is the paper I handed out in class.)

Use R with the piano note from our recorded musical instrument notes to: (1) multiply all the samples by -1; (2) make a sound consisting of five copies of the first 100 millisec.; (3) make a sound consisting of every third sample; and (4) make a sound with two overlapping copies of the entire note, the second starting 10 (not 100!) millisec. after the first. (Hint: at 44,100 samples per second, there are 44.1 samples per millisec.) Make and print out a graph of each with the plot() command, and on each, write a description of what it sounds like. (If you can squeeze the four plots on to fewer than four sheets of paper, both the trees and I would appreciate it.) NOTE: On Windows, the play() command just works. But on OS X, the only way I've found to get the play() command to work is to first say something like
  setWavPlayer("/Applications/'QuickTime Player.app'/Contents/MacOS/'QuickTime Player'")
first. On my system, this gives cryptic error messages, but it also opens a QuickTime window that plays the correct sound. Hit the escape key to get it to continue. There's probably a much better way; does anyone know? Perhaps the UNIX/LINUX way works?

There's no assignment for today.

Bring headphones to class today. You can pick up a pair at the Circulation Desk before class, or bring your own.
Read the section on perceptual coding performance evaluation, the last section (pp. 403-413) of Chapter 10 of Pohlmann, Ken (2005). Principles of Digital Audio, 5th ed. The book is on reserve for the class. (NOTE: since I didn't get this announcement on the Web site on time, this is optional! If you can't get to it by Monday, don't worry; it won't make that much difference.) Also, if you wish, send the whole class the terms we've covered so far that you think are most important, with your own definitions. There'll be nothing to turn in. (Of course, some of my own choices and definitions -- but not all -- are in the Vocabulary for Music Informatics on the class Web page.)

There's no assignment for today.
There will not be a quiz this week.

Write up a description of (a.k.a. proposal for) your project of two pages or so. Be as specific as possible! Talk about why you're going to do it (my requiring you do a project isn't a good enough reason, sorry) as well as what you're going to do. If you're doing an experiment of some kind, you should probably also say something about what you expect and/or hope the outcome will be. If it takes you three or even four pages, that's OK. And look at the "Guidelines for Writing and Rubric for Grading": they discuss proposals like this one.

Read Bainbridge, David, & Bell, Tim (2001). The challenge of optical music recognition. Computers and the Humanities 35(2), pp. 95-121.

Read Byrd, Donald (1994). Music Notation Software and Intelligence. Computer Music Journal 18(1), pp. 17-20 (available at http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Papers/MusNotSoftware+Intelligence.pdf), and Selfridge-Field, Eleanor (1997). Describing Musical Information. In Selfridge-Field, E., ed. (1997). Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes, pp. 3-38. MIT Press. On reserve in the Music Library, ML74 .B49.

Read about MIDI, e.g., in the IU Center for Electronic and Computer Music's Introduction to Computer Music (http://www.indiana.edu/~emusic/etext/toc.shtml), Chapter Three (this has some rough edges, but it's useful anyway), or the Wikipedia article "MIDI" (not completely accurate, but useful anyway). (Optional: If you want to read an early and interesting negative view, see F. Richard Moore (1988), The dysfunctions of MIDI, Computer Music Journal, 12 no.1, pp. 19-28.) Also, do this hands-on MIDI assignment. It shouldn't take too long, but it requires some hardware you may not have at home!

There's no assignment (obviously).

As background for today's presentation, experiment with two content-based music retrieval systems, Themefinder (http://themefinder.org) and Songtapper (http://www.songtapper.com). Try several of Themefinder's query input methods and options. If you'd like more information about these music-IR systems or about music IR in general, go to the Web site, "MIR Systems: A Survey of Music Information Retrieval Systems", at http://mirsystems.info/. We'll be covering this subject in much more detail in the next unit of the course.

Do this assignment to write an R program to count melodic intervals in a MIDI file. Also, If I asked you to revise your project proposal, turn in the revised proposal and the original one.

Read Byrd, Donald, & Isaacson, Eric (2003). A Music Representation Requirement Specification for Academia. Computer Music Journal 27(4), pp. 43-57; revised (2005) version (PDF, 228K). You can just skim the huge table that constitutes the last half of the article.

If you haven't already done so, send me via e-mail your 1st thru 3rd or 4th preferences for a presentation. I've said this at least six times, but I discovered again today that people are still confused, so I'll say it again: you can either choose from the papers/systems/web sites listed in the syllabus for units we haven't come to yet, or you can propose talking about something else relevant. Also read Roger Dannenberg's (1993) Music Representation Issues, Techniques, and Systems. Computer Music Journal 17(3), pp. 20-30; and the first few pages of Wiggins, Miranda, Smaill, & Harris's (1993) A Framework for the Evaluation of Music Representation Systems. Computer Music Journal 17(3), pp. 31-42. That is, what Yushen handed out in class, of course.

There's no assignment for today.

We just discussed Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock improvisation on the Star Spangled Banner as a difficult piece of music for any representation. Find another nasty example that pushes the limits of one or more representations. Then send me or bring to class (1) a recording of the music or reference to a recording of it in Variations2; (2) a visual representation of it, preferably in some kind of music notation, but a Variations2 Timeline is okay (and your own notation is okay, as long as it's clear to me what it means); and (3) a short (a page or two) but specific written description of features of the music that make it difficult to represent. Be sure to say what the music is and who the artist(s) and/or composer(s) is/are. You're welcome to work on this in two-person teams. (Everyone should now be able to use Variations2 from anywhere; http://variations2.indiana.edu/use/where.html says where to find computers that already have it installed, and how to download and install it on your own computer.)

Read Birmingham, William; Pardo, Bryan; Meek, Colin; & Shifrin, Jonah (2002). "The MusArt Music-Retrieval System".

Read Byrd, Donald, & Crawford, Tim (2002). Problems of Music Information Retrieval in the Real World. Information Processing and Management 38, pp. 249-272. Also, reading TBA by Kyung Ae.

Do this assignment to evaluate the similarity of some of the Mozart "Twinkle" Variations to the theme. The Variations2 timeline it refers to is at MozartTwinkleVars.v2t. NB: you can't open the timeline simply by clicking on the preceding link. You'll need to download the file to your local computer; start Variations2; and either use Variations2's "Open Timeline..." command or double-click the file you downloaded.

Bring headphones to class. No assignment is due today.

Read Cooper, Matthew; Foote, Jonathan; Pampalk, Elias; & Tzanetakis, George (2006). Visualization in Audio-Based Music Information Retrieval. Also, for those who haven't made appointments to see me, write a status report of a page or two. It needs to say specifically what you've done towards accomplishing your goals.

Nothing was due.

Reading for today's presentation: Since Hunter hasn't announced anything (though perhaps he did and I didn't get it, with the current e-mail problems?), go to the Columbia Law School Music Plagiarism Project website and look at the Introduction; Purpose and Content; Discusssion and Questions; and Case List: Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music.

Do this long-delayed assignment to complete an R program to find the melody most similar to a given melody. Also, reading for today's presentation TBA.

No assignment.

For the presentation, look at Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music (Yushen didn't say this, but the Tutorial is most relevant) and 120 Years Of Electronic Music. Also listen to In Celebration (1975) by American composer Charles Dodge, using Variations2 (http://server1.variations2.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/access?ALR6608), and to "Initial Experiments" for Switched-On Bach (1968?) by American composer Walter (now Wendy) Carlos, available at http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/N560Site-Fall06/MiscAudio. (You may also want to listen to some of the other tracks from Switched-On Bach in that directory. It's interesting stuff, and good background for Yushen's presentation.)

Reading for the presentation TBA.

Since I didn't get it out on time, this assignment is optional -- but it doesn't take long, and I think most of you would enjoy doing it. Listen to Xenakis' Diamorphoses (1957), which was composed in part with stochastic (probability-theory-based) methods, and to a simulated orchestral performance of Jeux de Vagues, a movement of Debussy's La Mer, in a demo of the Vienna Symphonic Library. For the latter, I'll ask on Monday what peculiarities anyone noticed, other than the violin solo (ca. 1 min. 50 sec. in) we discussed in class. Also check out a website that lets you easily try algorithmic composition, save your compositions, and turn them into ringtones :-) : Wolfram Tones. If you come up with anything you like, I'd appreciate it if you'd save it and send it to me, or put it on your cellphone and bring the phone to class.

Reading for the presentations TBA.

Nothing is due.

Nothing is due.

Do this assignment to complete an R program to "compose" melodies via Markov chains.

Homework TBA.

Homework TBA.

Final project papers are due.