Read Gladwell, Malcolm. The Formula: What if you built a machine to predict hit movies? New Yorker, 16 Oct. 2006; available at http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/NewYorker_FormulaToPredictHits.html. Also read Collins, Nick. Composing to Subvert Content Retrieval Engines. ICMA Array, Winter 2006, pp. 37-41; available at http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/Teach/Collins_arrayW06_SubvertIREngines.pdf. Clearly, the Gladwell article was written for a general audience; the Collins article is addressed to composers, specifically computer-oriented composers (the "ICMA" whose publication it appeared in is the International Computer Music Association). Think about the two articles' very different viewpoints and be ready to discuss them in class. Do you believe the claims made for the hit-song-predicting system program?

Nothing is due today, but see the assignment for next Weds. below.

Please bring headphones today.

Today, we'll start learning R. (Note: I'm posting this so late, I won't grade on preparation today. But if you can do any of the following before class, please do.) If you're planning to use your own computer for this course and you don't have R on it, go to The Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN-R) website, and download and install it: it's free, and there are versions for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Unfortunately, the downloading instructions aren't completely clear, at least for Windows. When you get to the Windows download page, you can click on "base" or "contrib." Click on "base". A link described as setup program (R-2.5.1-win32.exe) is present, but to the right, it says "Please download this from a mirror near you". Click on "Mirror near you": that'll give you a long list of URLs in various places around the world.

R can be used as a calculator as well as a programming language; in fact, it makes a first-rate "Graphing Calculator", and, for non-programmers, it's easier to start that way. Try out as much as you can -- at least through the end of the "Plotting" section -- in this "Introduction to R" tutorial. Caveat: it's really designed more for people with a mathematical than a musical background, so you may have to look a few things up. Please make a note of anything you don't understand; I'll ask, and I'll try to concentrate on things the class is having trouble with so I can be sure to explain those clearly. (If you don't want to use your own computer or can't get R installed, I believe all the computers in the STCs in the Music Library already have R. Computers in Informatics 109 should also have R; does anyone know?) NB: The CRAN-R website also has lots of documentation on R; you might want to browse around.

HOMEWORK #1: Part A. Send me a recording of a piece of music that you think is really interesting -- preferably also something you like a lot, but it's more important that be 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 -- preferably MP3 or AAC ("MP4"), but WMA is okay if you have to -- by 9 PM Monday. By a "piece", I mean one movement, song, aria, etc., not an entire cantata or symphony. 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. Also, (4) say why you think it's interesting, if you can put it into words. We'll listen to a minute or 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. Part B. Here's an exercise to use the Audacity audio editor to both learn its basic features and learn something about simple and complex sounds.

Finish the R stuff from Monday (at least through the end of the "Plotting" section in the Tutorial), and do this practice session. There's nothing to turn in, but preparation for class counts, as always.

The R programming/Star Wars assignment brings up several things worth thinking about (other than that I should be more careful in making up assignments). To wit:

1. There were two things wrong with my first version of the theme: I left out the pickup notes, and I had the rhythm wrong. I'd say memory errors (or were they perception errors?) of both types are pretty common. What are the implications for music information retrieval of this fact?
2. The revised assignment says the durations are "assuming it's in 2/2 or 4/4." Why say that? And does it matter for purposes of music informatics which of the two it is?
3. Audio and performance issues. A very simple one is avoiding clicks; keeping repeated notes from blending together is pretty simple, too. But the need for separation between is just one indication that music notation can't be taken literally. And what would it really take for a musically satisfying rendition of this theme, or (even more difficult) a realistic rendition?
4. We described the series of pitches we wanted in more-or-less the simplest possible way, and likewise with duration. These are representations of pitch and duration. In fact, they're very limited representations: for duration, for example, consider duration in a piece with several types of tuplets; multiple-dotted notes (up to quadruple dots have been seen in works by major composers); and ties. And there's no indication of absolute duration, only relative. But were these representations a good choice for this assignment? What if the melody was to be played musically, analyzed, or played with accompaniment?

HOMEWORK #2. Do this R programming assignment and e-mail your program to me.

Semester Projects
The Scholarly Method; Evaluating Evidence

Read the section "Research in General" in my Information Sources for Music Informatics Students. Take a look at the Wikipedia articles "scientific method" and "scholarly method" it mentions, the "Steps of the Scientific Method" it links to, and the conclusions of Huron's talk it links to. Also read about the "Together" Listening Experiments.

Please bring headphones; I promise we'll use them today, especially since I just told Matt Wright we'll be doing his "Together" experiment, and he agreed to be ready to pick up his phone and answer questions on the spot in case we run into trouble :-) .

To let people work on project proposals, there's no homework as such for this week. But, for today, please read the Wikipedia article "MIDI".

To help you decide on projects, I'll do 5-minute demos today of several widely-differing music-informatics projects and systems, for example, Sven Koenig's sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ! ("audio mosaicing", sampling taken to an extreme); David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, artificial composition in the style of Bach, Chopin, Mozart, etc.); my own NightingaleSearch (score-based music searching); Chris Raphael's Music Plus One (musically intelligent accompanying of a soloist); the Sonic Visualiser from Queen Mary College of the Univ. of London (visualization of audio analysis); my own MeTAMuSE MROMR (using multiple recognizers to improve Optical Music Recognition); and Francois Pachet's The Continuator (jazz improvisation).

Assignment TBA; nothing to be turned in

Assignment TBA; nothing to be turned in

Assignment TBA; there may be homework to turn in.

No assignment

Before class, look at and listen to four Chopin Preludes, Op. 28, nos. 1 thru 4 (C major, A minor, G major, E minor). Here's a page with a PDF of the music. You can listen to them via the Variations2 system at the Music Library, or -- if you don't want to go there and don't have access to anything else -- here are some MIDI files that leave much to be desired but should be adequate for our purposes. As you look and listen, think about how solidly each of these pieces establish and remain in their official keys.

HOMEWORK #3. (a) Go to Rainer Typke's web site, "MIR Systems: A Survey of Music Information Retrieval Systems". It has descriptions of and links to dozens of music-IR systems, a number of which can be used over the Web for free (e.g., C-Brahms, Musipedia, Midomi, Songtapper, Themefinder). Choose three of them that aren't listed in my Similarity Scale; (this excludes C-Brahms, Musipedia, and Themefinder, among others). Use each to try to retrieve something you'd expect (from the description of the system and its database) it to be able to find. If you don't find it immediately, try to figure out why: i.e., is it really not there, or did a problem with your query or something else result in it not being found. As you do, take notes -- the verbal, not the musical, kind :-) . How should each system be classified with my Similarity Scale? Why? Write up your answers. (b) Try to get a music-recommender website like Pandora, Last.fm, or MusicStrands to find some music you like but weren't previously familiar with. Take notes. How should each system be classified with my Similarity Scale? Why? Write up your answers.

Work on your project proposals.

Read Byrd, Donald, & Crawford, Tim (2002). Problems of Music Information Retrieval in the Real World. (PDF, 296K). Information Processing and Management 38, pp. 249-272. In many ways, I still think this old paper of mine is very good, but it is old. What about it seems out of date? Be prepared to discuss it.

HOMEWORK #4: Write up a description of (a.k.a. proposal for) your project of about two to four pages -- but if you need five or six, that's OK. Be as specific as possible! Talk about your motivation, i.e., why you're going to do it as well as what you're going to do. If you're doing an experiment of some kind, you should say something about what you expect and/or hope the outcome will be; that has a lot to do with motivation. And take a close look at the "Guidelines for Writing and Rubric for Grading", especially the part about proposals. How will I grade proposals? Just OK or not; if yours isn't OK, I'll want you to revise it. Here's a sample proposal, one that I liked from a previous class. (One detail that could have been better: in addition to the one reference, it should have had references for the MUSTRAN and DARMS systems it mentions. Also note that there's very little in it that relates to the scholarly or the scientific method.)

Read Blair, D., & Maron, M.E. (1985, March). An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-text Document-Retrieval System. Communications of the ACM 28(3), pp. 289-299. This is a famous paper in the text-IR research world. It's a well-thought-out and meticulously done large-scale study of an early full-text IR system, IBM's STAIRS. STAIRS is obsolete, but the methodology they used is still exemplary, and some of the discussion is extremely thought-provoking. However, their conclusions are very surprising, even bizarre! If you disagree with their conclusions, where do you think they went wrong?

Watch this video of a Google tech talk by Luis Von Ahn on "games with a purpose" and human computation. I thought it was absolutely fascinating; I hope you do too. Of course, the Listen Game is an example of a game with a purpose. But he talks about the best strategy for an image-labelling game. Is the best strategy for music the same? And he talks about symmetric vs. assymmetric games. What are the music equivalents, if any? Also, read Byrd, Donald (1994). Music Notation Software and Intelligence. Computer Music Journal 18(1), pp. 17-20.

Revised project proposals are due.

No assignment.

Fourier's theorem & additive synthesis

For HOMEWORK #5, do the following.

1. Do this additive-synthesis assignment. Its addsynenv program requires a Mac running OS X, definitely at least v. 10.3 and possibly 10.4. Sorry, but I don't think it runs on Windows at all.
2. Here's an R program, FourierRandomTimbre, that supposedly generates a random timbre via additive synthesis. (Looking at this program to generate a sine wave two ways may help you understand how it works.) But it doesn't really create random timbres; it actually just generates fixed random waveforms, and all the sounds that can be made that way are pretty similar! Three severe limitations of fixed waveforms are: (1) the overall amplitude of the sound is constant; (2) the relative amplitudes of the harmonics are fixed; and (3) all partials are harmonic. (The last one rules out sounds like bells and other percussion instruments that still have at least semi-definite pitch.) Notice that addsynenv has none of these limitations, though it does have a maximum of only six partials. So, here's the assignment. (a) (Music Informatics majors, plus anyone else that wants to) Modify FourierRandomTimbre so it comes closer to doing what it claims. One obvious way is adding envelopes for the harmonics, along the lines of addsynenv; a simpler version would be with one envelope for the whole sound instead of a separate envelope for each harmonic. (In either case, for simplicity, the envelopes should probably be built into the program--you don't have to let the user modify them, as addsynenv does.) Whatever you do, send me the modified program. (b) (Everyone else) What would it take to modify FourierRandomTimbre so it comes closer to doing what it claims? Add comments to the program describing as precisely as you can, in English or, preferably, pseudo-code (if you know what that is!) what changes you'd make and where you'd make them, and send me the modified program.

Our chance to check out IU's little-known echoic and anechoic chambers. We'll meet on Forrest St. in front of the building, around the corner just south of 1010 E. 13th St. (There's an official IU sign in front saying something like "Institute for the Study of Advanced Human Capabilities - Acoustical Testing Chambers".) Forrest St. dead ends there, just north of the railroad tracks; it's between Walnut Grove and Woodlawn. On 13th St. just to its west is a large unmarked building that I think is actually a gigantic air conditioner, then the IU Press building. We'll try to measure the rooms' reverberation time and impulse response (with the aid of Cory's recorder), discuss why we can't hear standing waves, etc. (Don't worry, I don't expect you to know what any of those acoustics terms means yet!) Cory, be sure to bring your recorder; everyone, bring noise- and music-making devices that aren't too large. A few balloons would help, too -- seriously; I'll try to bring some.

Read the Wikipedia article Timbre; pay special attention to the idea of formants.

No assignment.

Guest speaker: Kyung Ae Lim. Kyung Ae recently got her MS in Music Informatics here; in fact, she's our first graduate, and the work she'll discuss is a continuation of her capstone project.

One of the R Example Programs on my website is DescribeAudioSegments.r. It's supposed to take any audio file containing music and divide it into sections in an intuitively sensible way, but it's a very crude first version. Take a look at it to get an idea of how it works, and test it on a couple of audio files. You might try files on my website, either Our Chosen Music or something from MiscAudio. As the comments in the program say, it was inspired by Nina Fales, and the NinaF subdirectory of MiscAudio has a couple of test files from her. (DescribeAudioSegments can't handle MP3's, etc.; you'll have to convert them to .wav's.) Does it do a good job? I doubt it :-) . But if not, why not? We'll discuss it in class.

Since we didn't get to it Friday, for tomorrow, be prepared to discuss my DescribeAudioSegments program. In fact, anyone who can play a sound file, show us what the program does for the sound file, and say something about it will do really well for preparation and participation!

Guest speaker: Olga Balanyuk. Read "Scales and Beats", Chapter 4 of Pierce, John R. (1992). The Science of Musical Sound, Revised Edition. It's on reserve in the Music Library. In addition, Olga suggests reading Wilkinson, Scott (2005, May). Hermode Tuning. Electronic Musician 21(5), p. 32.

Written project progress reports are due from those who haven't made an appointment to meet with me this week. If you make an appointment but don't actually meet with me, unless it's my fault, I'll expect a written report from you by the end of the day Sunday.

There's no assignment.

There's no assignment.

HOMEWORK #6: Do this assignment to design a visualization for Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock improvisation on the Star Spangled Banner.

Read and be prepared to discuss Boyle, James; Jenkins, Jennifer; & Aoki, Keith (2006). Bound By Law? Tales From the Public Domain. Believe it or not, this is a comic book about intellectual property rights (IPR) written by three law professors. Though addressed primarily to documentary filmmakers, it's is an excellent introduction to IPR issues for those interested in music, especially since a great many of the examples cited involve music. As musicians yourselves (most of you, anyway), what do you think of all this? Are the RIAA and the MPAA really OK? Also refresh your memory of Sven Koenig's "copyright infringement system", sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, which I showed at the beginning of the semester.

Details TBA

Prepare for the holiday.

Recover from the holiday.

More on the Music Similarity Scale? Music vs. Text? Markov Models? Our Chosen Music? "I Like to Draw Poorly" and Composing to Subvert Content Retrieval Engines? History of Music Informatics? Musical Examples for Hofstadter's "Gšdel, Escher, Bach"? Probably Music Similarity, Sampling, and Intellectual Property Rights.

Semester Wrapup

Final presentation: Andreas Metz: How strongly different cadences establish tonality via symbolic data on chords

Final presentation: Siriporn "Jina" Jinanarong: Converting MIDI file to forms of Thai music notation

Final presentation: Cory Mixdorf: Instrumentalist sensitivity to pitch for their own instrument vs. others

Final presentation: Gabi Teodoru: Intuitive segmentation of audio for ethnomusicology (we hope)