Computational Phonogram Archiving

The future of music archiving and search engines lies in deep learning and big data. Music information retrieval algorithms automatically analyze musical features like timbre, melody, rhythm or musical form, and artificial intelligence then sorts and relates these features. At the first International Symposium on Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving held on November 9 to 11, 2017 at the Institute of Systematic Musicology in Hamburg, Germany, a new Computational Phonogram Archiving standard was discussed as an interdisciplinary approach. Ethnomusicologists, music and computer scientists, systematic musicologists as well as music archivists, composers and musicians presented tools, methods and platforms and shared fieldwork and archiving experiences in the fields of musical acoustics, informatics, music theory as well as on music storage, reproduction and metadata. The Computational Phonogram Archiving standard is also in high demand in the music market as a search engine for music consumers. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the field written by leading researchers around the globe.

How do we understand culture and shape its future? How do we cross the bridge between culture as ideas and feelings and physical, cultural objects, all this within the endless variety and complexity of modern and traditional societies? This book proposes a Physical Culture Theory, taking culture as a self-organizing impulse pattern of electric forces. Bridging the gap to consciousness, the Physical Culture Theory proposes that consciousness content, what we think, hear, feel, or see is also just this: spatio-temporal electric fields. Music is a perfect candidate to elaborate on such a Physical Culture Theory. Music is all three, musical instrument acoustics, music psychology, and music ethnology. They emerge into living musical systems like all life is self-organization. Therefore the Physical Culture Theory knows no split between nature and nurture, hard and soft sciences, brains and musical instruments. It formulates mathematically complex systems as Physical Models rather than Artificial Intelligence. It includes ethical rules for maintaining life and finds culture and arts to be Human Rights. Enlarging these ideas and mathematical methods into all fields of culture, ecology, economy, or the like will be the task for the next decades to come.

The study of the acoustic and vibrational characteristics of musical instruments in terms of their mechanical behavior, sound emission, and characteristics started thousands of years ago, and among the physicists and mathematicians that addressed this matter, we should at least recognize Leonardo da Vinci, with his experimental water organ, and Ernst Chladni, who discovered nodal patterns on rigid surfaces such as soundboards. The growing awareness of our intangible cultural heritage and the need to better understand our roots in the field of music have contributed to increasing the efforts to extend our knowledge in this field, defining new physical parameters, extending the analysis to other musical instruments, and developing new methods to synthesize sound from musical instruments using a simple keyboard.

An exploration of rhythm and the richness of musical time from the perspective of performers, composers, analysts, and listeners.

Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It Up Together, Leslie A. Tilley explores the practice of collective musical improvisation cross-culturally, making a case for placing collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and advocating ethnographically informed music analysis as a powerful tool for investigating improvisational processes. Through two contrasting Balinese case studies—of the reyong gong chime’s melodic norot practice and the interlocking drumming tradition kendang arja—Tilley proposes and tests analytical frameworks for examining collectively improvised performance. At the micro-level, Tilley’s analyses offer insight into the note-by-note decisions of improvising performers; at the macro-level, they illuminate larger musical, discursive, structural, and cultural factors shaping those decisions. This multi-tiered inquiry reveals that unpacking how performers play and imagine as a collective is crucial to understanding improvisation and demonstrates how music analysis can elucidate these complex musical and interactional relationships. Highlighting connections with diverse genres from various music cultures, Tilley’s examinations of collective improvisation also suggest rich potential for cross-genre exploration. The surrounding discussions point to larger theories of communication and interaction, creativity and cognition that will be of interest to a range of readers—from ethnomusicologists and music theorists to cognitive psychologists, jazz studies scholars, and improvising performers. Setting new parameters for the study of improvisation, Making It Up Together opens up fresh possibilities for understanding the creative process, in music and beyond.

This unique reference book offers a holistic description of the multifaceted field of systematic musicology, which is the study of music, its production and perception, and its cultural, historical and philosophical background. The seven sections reflect the main topics in this interdisciplinary subject. The first two parts discuss musical acoustics and signal processing, comprehensively describing the mathematical and physical fundamentals of musical sound generation and propagation. The complex interplay of physiology and psychology involved in sound and music perception is covered in the following sections, with a particular focus on psychoacoustics and the recently evolved research on embodied music cognition. In addition, a huge variety of technical applications for professional training, music composition and consumer electronics are presented. A section on music ethnology completes this comprehensive handbook. Music theory and philosophy of music are imbedded throughout. Carefully edited and written by internationally respected experts, it is an invaluable reference resource for professionals and graduate students alike.

Wolfgang Ernst's new work, Technológos in Being, in its explicit media-scientific approach, aligns with the politics of the thinking media series to publish innovative works that advance media studies towards the 'new sciences.' Ernst's invites readers to re-adjust their ideas of Media Studies: the conviction that an extended understanding of "medium" needs to include a concept of materiality that focuses on "non- human" agencies as well. The book grounds media analysis radically in the technological apparatuses, relays, transistors, hard- and software, to precisely locate the scenes, operations and frictions where reasoning logos and 'informable' matter interfere.

Most studies of musical improvisation focus on individual musicians. But that is not the whole story. From jazz to flamenco, Shona mbira to Javanese gamelan, improvised practices thrive on group creativity, relying on the close interaction of multiple simultaneously improvising performers. In Making It Up Together, Leslie A. Tilley explores the practice of collective musical improvisation cross-culturally, making a case for placing collectivity at the center of improvisation discourse and advocating ethnographically informed music analysis as a powerful tool for investigating improvisational processes. Through two contrasting Balinese case studies—of the reyong gong chime’s melodic norot practice and the interlocking drumming tradition kendang arja—Tilley proposes and tests analytical frameworks for examining collectively improvised performance. At the micro-level, Tilley’s analyses offer insight into the note-by-note decisions of improvising performers; at the macro-level, they illuminate larger musical, discursive, structural, and cultural factors shaping those decisions. This multi-tiered inquiry reveals that unpacking how performers play and imagine as a collective is crucial to understanding improvisation and demonstrates how music analysis can elucidate these complex musical and interactional relationships. Highlighting connections with diverse genres from various music cultures, Tilley’s examinations of collective improvisation also suggest rich potential for cross-genre exploration. The surrounding discussions point to larger theories of communication and interaction, creativity and cognition that will be of interest to a range of readers—from ethnomusicologists and music theorists to cognitive psychologists, jazz studies scholars, and improvising performers. Setting new parameters for the study of improvisation, Making It Up Together opens up fresh possibilities for understanding the creative process, in music and beyond.