Visualizing Music

To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually? Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation. Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.

To feel the emotional force of music, we experience it aurally. But how can we convey musical understanding visually? Visualizing Music explores the art of communicating about music through images. Drawing on principles from the fields of vision science and information visualization, Eric Isaacson describes how graphical images can help us understand music. By explaining the history of music visualizations through the lens of human perception and cognition, Isaacson offers a guide to understanding what makes musical images effective or ineffective and provides readers with extensive principles and strategies to create excellent images of their own. Illustrated with over 300 diagrams from both historical and modern sources, including examples and theories from Western art music, world music, and jazz, folk, and popular music, Visualizing Music explores the decisions made around image creation. Together with an extensive online supplement and dozens of redrawings that show the impact of effective techniques, Visualizing Music is a captivating guide to thinking differently about design that will help music scholars better understand the power of musical images, thereby shifting the ephemeral to material.

Annotation The three volume set LNAI 4692, LNAI 4693, and LNAI 4694, constitute the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2007, held in Vietri sul Mare, Italy, September 12-14, 2007. The 409 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from about 1203 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the first volume are artificial neural networks and connectionists systems, fuzzy and neuro-fuzzy systems, evolutionary computation, machine learning and classical AI, agent systems, knowledge based and expert systems, hybrid intelligent systems, miscellaneous intelligent algorithms, intelligent vision and image processing, knowledge management and ontologies, Web intelligence, multimedia, e-learning and teaching, intelligent signal processing, control and robotics, other intelligent systems applications, papers of the experience management and engineering workshop, industrial applications of intelligent systems, as well as information engineering and applications in ubiquotous computing environments.

Containing extensive artwork serving as demonstration, as well as a DVD with sound and video clips, this collection of essays on electroacoustic music explores the creative possibilities to be found in various forms of musical analysis. Taking pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre as the four basic elements of music, the authors discuss electroacoustic works and examine: * the applications of neumes * contemporary staff notation * sound orchestra and score files * time-domain representations * spectrograms. Taking into consideration both the positive aspects (preservation of the abstract) and negative aspects (creative limitation) of these analytical methods, the authors have created a useful resource for students of electroacoustic music.

The advances in computer entertainment, multi-player and online games, technology-enabled art, culture and performance have created a new form of entertainment and art. The success of this new field has influenced the development of the digital entertainment industry and related products/services, which has impacted every aspect of our lives. Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts is an edited volume contributed by worldwide experts in the field of the new digital and interactive media, and their applications in entertainment and arts. This handbook covers leading edge media technologies, and the latest research applied to digital entertainment and arts. The main focus of Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts targets interactive and online games, edutainment, e-performance, personal broadcasting, innovative technologies for digital arts, digital visual and auditory media, augmented reality, moving media, and other advanced topics. The final chapters of this book present future trends and developments within this explosive field. Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts serves as a primary reference for advanced-level students, researchers and professors studying computer science and electrical engineering. With the dramatic growth of interactive digital entertainment and art applications, this handbook is also suitable as a reference for practitioners, programmers, and engineers working in this field.

This comprehensive study of digital visualization brings together insights from the fields of anthropology and music analysis and explores their import for critical pedagogy and digital education. Anchored on an array of ethnographically informed examples of visualization, it discusses the cultural, educational and cognitive repercussions of our engagement with visually-centered research and teaching. The book offers a hands-on approach to experimental pedagogies attuned to the needs of researchers, educators and artists in the digital humanities who seek to open passageways between theory and praxis.

Providing a complete review of existing work in music emotion developed in psychology and engineering, Music Emotion Recognition explains how to account for the subjective nature of emotion perception in the development of automatic music emotion recognition (MER) systems. Among the first publications dedicated to automatic MER, it begins with a comprehensive introduction to the essential aspects of MER—including background, key techniques, and applications. This ground-breaking reference examines emotion from a dimensional perspective. It defines emotions in music as points in a 2D plane in terms of two of the most fundamental emotion dimensions according to psychologists—valence and arousal. The authors present a computational framework that generalizes emotion recognition from the categorical domain to real-valued 2D space. They also: Introduce novel emotion-based music retrieval and organization methods Describe a ranking-base emotion annotation and model training method Present methods that integrate information extracted from lyrics, chord sequence, and genre metadata for improved accuracy Consider an emotion-based music retrieval system that is particularly useful for mobile devices The book details techniques for addressing the issues related to: the ambiguity and granularity of emotion description, heavy cognitive load of emotion annotation, subjectivity of emotion perception, and the semantic gap between low-level audio signal and high-level emotion perception. Complete with more than 360 useful references, 12 example MATLAB® codes, and a listing of key abbreviations and acronyms, this cutting-edge guide supplies the technical understanding and tools needed to develop your own automatic MER system based on the automatic recognition model.

This book unfolds the manifold, complex and intertwined relations between Fuzzy Logic and music in a first comprehensive overview on this topic: systematically as an outline, as completely as possible, in the aspects of Fuzzy Logic in this relation, and especially in music as a process with three main phases, five anthropological layers, and thirteen forms of existence of the art work (Classics, Jazz, Pop, Folklore). Being concerned with the ontological, gnoseological, psychological, and (music-) aesthetical status and the relative importance of different phenomena of relationship between music and Fuzzy Logic, the explication follows the four main principles (with five phenotypes) of Fuzzy Logic with respect to music: similarity, sharpening 1 as filtering, sharpening 2 as crystallization, blurring, and variation. The book reports on years of author’s research on topics that have been only little explored so far in the area of Music and Fuzzy Logic. It merges concepts of music analysis with fuzzy logical modes of thinking, in a unique way that is expected to attract both specialists of music and specialists of Fuzzy Logic, and also non-specialists in both fields. The book introduces the concept of dialectic between sharpening and – conscious – “blurring”. In turn, some important aspects of this dialectic are discussed, placing them in an historical dimension, and ending in the postulation of a 'musical turn' in the sciences, with some important reflections concerning a “Philosophy of Fuzzy Logic”. Moreover, a production-oriented thinking is borrowed from fuzzy logic to musicology in this book, opening new perspectives in music, and possibly also in other artistic fields.