Instructor: Don Byrd, Visiting Associate Professor of Informatics & Adjunct Associate Professor of Music
Email: donbyrd@indiana.edu
Offices: Informatics 307; Music Library, Simon Center (ask for me at the Reference or Circulation Desk)
Phone: 856-0129
Office Hours: 2:30 - 3:30 Weds in the Music Library; other times by appointment

We meet Mon/Weds/Fri from 1:25 - 2:15 PM, in Simon Center M373. To get to M373, you must go into the Music Library; then go up two floors.

Course Overview and Goals

Music notation of any kind–for example, guitar tablature, Javanese gamelan notation, or conventional Western notation– represents information that's quite different from the sounds it allegedly corresponds to. One of the main goals of the course is to make clear the implications of that fact for almost any application of computers to musical information. (For MIDI fans, piano-roll notation, as seen especially in sequencer programs, is analogous to MIDI; both are somewhere between notation and audio, and we will discuss all three forms.) Other objectives include studying the representation of music and representations of music; learning what the state of the art is for music-seaching programs; and seeing how it's possible to explore musical issues (whether theoretical, musicological, music-psychological, or other) with software and databases that are available or becoming available now. We'll investigate research technologies like "query by humming" and the amazing new games for creating metadata, and look at tools that are in practical use now like music-recommender web sites and IU's own ground-breaking Variations2 system.

The Fundamental Theorem of Music Informatics (maybe)

Music is created by humans for other humans, and humans can bring a tremendous amount of contextual knowledge to bear on anything they do; in fact, they can't avoid it, and they're rarely conscious of it. But (as of early 2008) computers can never bring much contextual knowledge to bear, often none at all, and never without being specifically programmed to do so. Therefore doing almost anything with music by computers is very difficult; many problems are essentially intractable. For the forseeable future, the only way to make significant progress is by doing as well as possible with very little context, thereby sidestepping the intractable problems. -- Don Byrd, 7 Jan. 2008

Class Format and Requirements

Prerequisites

• You should be at ease with technical thinking in general (as in most music-theory, informatics, and physical science courses, for example).
• Solid understanding of music fundamentals is essential; some music theory background is helpful. Musical background comparable to sophomore music majors should be more than adequate.
• Computer programming experience in any language will be very helpful, but is not required.

Readings

There is no textbook as such. Music informatics is too new and too fast-moving for anything suitable to exist. Many readings will available on the Web; others will be on reserve in the Music Library, or I'll hand copies out. They will be selected mostly from recent literature -- not all of it academic -- such as Computer Music Journal, the Journal of New Music Research, and Electronic Musician, as well as proceedings of conferences like the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, International Computer Music Conference, Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, and the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, and books like Pohlmann's Principles of Digital Audio.

Tools

[NEW] Computer-music pioneer Andy Moorer once said he could not imagine doing computer music without graphics. I agree; being able to see what you're doing with music, even if it's in audio form, makes a tremendous difference. Besides tools for programming in R, we'll be using programs for visualizing and editing music in different forms, most likely including Audacity and Sonic Visualizer (for audio), MidiSwing or Digital Performer (for MIDI and audio events), and NightingaleSearch (for music notation).

Course Outline

The following outline of major topics and materials to study (readings, systems, etc.) is approximate and subject to change. However, I don't expect it to change much, except for adding study materials.

I. Introduction

Week 1-2. Course Logistics, Introduction, and Motivation

   Organizing and Searching Musical Information: A Whirlwind Tour

   Elements of Programming in R

II. Organization of Musical Information

Week 3-6. Representations of Music and Audio; Doing something useful in R

   MIDI, Synthesizers, and Sequencers

   Audio; Acoustics and Psychoacoustics; Formats; Lossless and Lossy Compression

Week 7-8. Music Notation; Encodings of Music Notation; XML

   Music Collections: Available or Not, Free or At Cost

   Software for Handling and Converting Encodings/Representations; AMR and OMR

III. Finding Musical Information

Week 9. Metadata, Content, and "Collaboration"

   A Music Similarity Scale

   Browsing, Searching, and Filtering; Human Computation & Metadata Games

   Mid-term Presentations

- - - - - - - - - Spring Break - - - - - - - - -

Week 10. Browsing vs. Searching/Filtering; Searching from Shazam to OMRAS

   Music-IR Evaluation: Precision, Recall, & Relevance Judgments

IV. Musical Similarity and Finding Music by Content

Week 11.

   Searching Polyphonic Audio: "fuzziness" via Harmonic Distributions or Chroma?

   Searching Symbolic Music: Humdrum, Themefinder, NightingaleSearch

   IR vs. Digital Libraries

   Music-IR Evaluation: the Cranfield model; TREC and MIREX

V. Finding Music via Metadata

Weeks 12 & 13. The Full Range of Music-IR Tasks: General and Music-specific Metadata; Bibliographic Searching, Filtering, etc.

• Music Recommender Systems
• Similarity Maps, Visualization, and Finding Music by Browsing
• Variations2, iTunes, and Music Libraries; Library Metadata
• Genre Identification and Genre Classifications; MIREX, etc.

Week 14-15. Final Presentations; Review of the course

Books on Reserve (in the Music Library)

• Barlow, Harold & Morgenstern, Sam (1948). A Dictionary of Musical Themes. New York: Crown Publishers.
• Brinkman, Alexander (1990). PASCAL Programming for Music Research. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
• Hewlett, Walter, & Selfridge-Field, Eleanor, eds. (2001). The Virtual Score (Computing in Musicology 12). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Marsden, Alan, & Pople, Anthony, eds. (1992). Computer Representations and Models in Music. London, San Diego, New York, etc.: Academic Press.
• Moore, F. Richard (1990). Elements of Computer Music. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
• Pierce, John R. (1992). The Science of Musical Sound, Revised Edition. New York: W. H. Freeman.
• Pohlmann, Ken (2005). Principles of Digital Audio, Fifth Edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Selfridge-Field, Eleanor, ed. (1997). Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Williams, David, & Webster, Peter (2006). Experiencing Music Technology, 3rd ed. Belmont, California: Thomson Higher Education (but the cover says "Thomson/Schirmer").

Course Requirements and Grading

Miscellaneous

If you have a documented disability and anticipate needing accommodations in this course, please make arrangements to meet with me soon.

If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, please see me during office hours, make an appointment, write me a note (anonymously if you like), or send me email.

University policies on academic dishonesty will be followed. Cite your sources. Students found to be engaging in plagiarism, cheating, or other types of dishonesty will receive an F for the course. For further information, see the IU Code of Student Ethics at http://campuslife.indiana.edu/Code/index1.html .

Work turned in late will be graded lower; if it happens repeatedly, it will not be accepted without prior arrangement for compelling reasons.