Choose a piece of music that you think is really interesting: preferably also something you like a lot, but it's more important that you find it interesting. By a "piece", I mean one movement, song, aria, etc., not an entire 90-minute Mahler symphony. Short movements (say, 5 min. or less) are preferable to long ones. Also, if you feel the opening isn't particularly interesting, choose a section of a couple of minutes that is. Then send me (a) a recording of it, and (b) reasonably detailed notation for the first page (of the section you chose, if it's not the opening). I'd much prefer the notation be from something published, if possible; it doesn't have to be conventional Western music notation, or any kind of conventional music notation. Otherwise, no holds barred; the wilder the variety of music, the better!

To do this as efficiently as possible, get me an audio file in a standard format (MP3, if possible; AAC, a.k.a. MP4, is okay too) and one or two files of page images (PDF, GIF, JPEG, or PNG) by 9 PM Monday. You can get them to me as e-mail attachments, if the files aren't too large (i.e., a total of no more than 1500K); by putting them on the Web and telling me how to get them; by giving me a CDROM containing them; or, if they're in the Music Library's Variations2 system, by telling me how to find them there. If you are giving me files, please follow the naming conventions described in "Miscellaneous Class Procedures". 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/)
3. if applicable and the information is available, the composer(s) and date of composition
4. for the recording: the performer(s), date of performance, and performance medium (e.g., solo kazoo, vocal quartet, turntabilism, software synthesis, etc.)
5. for the notation: the publisher or source and (if published) date of publication Of course a lot of those items don't make sense for a lot of music.
6. Why you think it's interesting, if you can put it into words.

We'll listen to a minute or two and look at a page or two of everyone's selection, and we'll briefly discuss each of them in terms of what characteristics it has that you could plausibly get a computer to recognize, and/or the relationship between the performance and the notation. We'll revisit at least some of this music later in the semester.