The purpose of this study, ve to analyze the stylistic characteristics in the unaccompanied music of one twentieth century composer, Francis Poulenc, in order to discover the choral problems which would confront choruses and conductors as they performed his music. It is hoped that this study will not only enable choral conductors to better understand, interpret, and appreciate the music of Poulenc, but also will serve as a guide toward the investigation of other twentieth century composers and their works.

We propose a Bayesian monaural source separation system to extract each individual tone from mixture signals of piano music performance. Specifically, tone extractions can be facilitated by model-based inference. Two signal models based on summation of sinusoidal waves were employed to represent piano tones. The first model is the traditional General Model, which is a variant of sinusoidal modeling, for representing a tone for high modeling quality; but this model often fails for mixtures of tones. The second model is an instrument-specific model tailored for the piano sound; its modeling quality is not as high as the traditional General Model, but its structure makes source separation easier. To exploit the benefits offered by both the traditional General Model and our proposed Piano Model, we used the hierarchical Bayesian framework to combine both models in the source separation process. These procedures allowed us to recover suitable parameters (frequencies, amplitudes, phases, intensities and fine-tuned onsets) for thorough analyses and characterizations of musical nuances. Isolated tones from a target recording were used to train the Piano Model, and the timing and pitch of individual music notes in the target recording were supplied to our proposed system for different experiments. Our results show that our proposed system gives robust and accurate separation of signal mixtures, and yields a separation quality significantly better than those reported in previous works. / What makes a good piano performance? An expressive piano performance owes its emotive power to the performer's skills in shaping the music with nuances. For the purpose of performance analysis, nuance can be defined as any subtle manipulation of sound parameters including attack, timing, pitch, loudness and timbre. A major obstacle to a systematic computational analysis of musical nuances is that it is often difficult to uncover relevant sound parameters from the complex audio signal of a piano music performance. A piano piece invariably involves simultaneous striking of multiple keys, and it is not obvious how one may extract the parameters of individual keys from the combined mixed signal. This problem of parameter extraction can be formulated as a source separation problem. Our research goal is to extract individual tones (frequencies, amplitudes and phases) from a mixture of piano tones. / Szeto, Wai Man. / Adviser: Wong Kim Hong. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-03, Section: B, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-128). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese.

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Music Johannesburg, 2016 / In this part-written, part-composed creative research project I consider the music of ‘indie’ video games, specifically exploring some of the myriad dynamic compositional approaches in this particular category of game development. In my written work I analyse three indie video games – Braid (2008), Fez (2012) and Journey (2012) – each of which use unique methods to apply music dynamically. I use interviews with the games’ creators, as well as close analysis and transcription of significant sections of each video game, in order to reveal how music is used to provide the player with a more immersive, satisfying, and involving gaming experience. I also consider the use of ambient music in indie video games, a common feature of a large number of contemporary games, weighing up its merits and limitations. Musical concepts and compositional approaches raised in my written work have informed the portfolio of compositions submitted for this degree, and, similarly, my creative work has informed my analytical research. My creative work explores, amongst other aspects, indeterminate form, ambient music, and ways of ‘looping’ material in the creation of unrepeatable structures. This thesis also considers music which functions narratively in games – a function that might necessitate a greater degree of musical linearity — and how this musical role might be incompatible with the demands of interactivity. After briefly introducing the concepts dealt with across this thesis in Chapter 1, Chapters 2 to 4 take the form of case studies of the indie games mentioned above, with each chapter tackling unique challenges that game composers face when writing music for non-linear games, by which I mean games structured so that not all players will experience the content in the same order due to player agency. More specifically, Chapter 2 deals with the game Braid and its use of pre-composed, licensed music and how the game’s developer applies this music dynamically to the game. Chapter 3 deals with Fez and its mainly adaptive musical approach, its built-in software music engine, ‘Fezzer’, which allows for a composer to input and manipulate musical loops in the game, and nostalgia in indie video game aesthetics. Chapter 4 centres on the video game Journey and on how autonomous, ‘narrative’ music in video games might be seen to exist in opposition to music’s ability to be truly dynamic. Finally, Chapter 5 reflects on my own creative work for this thesis; how concepts from the case studies have informed my creative work and vice versa. / MT2017

Bibliography: leaf 162.

Bibliography: leaves 94-99.

This dissertation uses Béla Bartók's 1943 Concerto for Orchestra as a focal point for investigating conceptual models of music based on early twentieth-century notions of organicism. In particular, this project brings together two traditions--one structural, one narrative--in an attempt to integrate motivic allusion and programmatic discourse, and places this piece within a metadiscourse of musical 'Fate' stories that continually point back to Beethoven. Based largely on the work of George Lakoff, chapter 1 is an overview of modern category theories that rejects objectivism and establishes a philosophical view of meaning that is shaped by our conceptual models. Chapter 2 is a comparison of the writings of Schoenberg and Bartók that invoke organicist values of musical development and variation. Stemming from Bartók's claim that Schoenberg's Op. 11 showed composers the "new ways and means" of modern composition, this chapter speculates on potential influences and involves a reinvestigation of Schoenberg's Op. 11, No. 1. Chapter 3 examines the difference between strict hierarchical models of music and metonymic reductions. Following a critique of Fred Lerdahl's recent attempts to apply his Chomskian prolongational model to post-tonal and atonal music, this chapter traces the integration of motivic parallelism and key architecture in tonal music as a primary organizing feature of musical form, foreshadowing their use by Bartók as replacements for the structural functions of harmony. Chapter 4 investigates the relationship of musical motives and post-Beethovenian narratives of fate/overcoming and fate/death in music by Bizet, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, and Richard Strauss, providing a context for Bartók's motivic and programmatic allusion to--and transformation of--that very tradition. Chapter 5 draws the material from the previous chapters together in a structural-programmatic reading of the Concerto for Orchestra that situates it as a transformation of the evolving traditions that inform it. / text

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Martin Streda is a one-act monodrama for baritone and an ensemble of eight instrumentalists. The libretto was written by the composer. The drama concerns Martin Streda, a Czech political prisoner in a solitary confinement cell of a communist concentration camp on the eve of his death. The opera has a duration of approximately 30 minutes and is divided into four main parts. The analytical essay describes the development and operation of Mar-sys, a collection of twenty pitch aggregates derived from intervalic cells, rhythmic cells drawn from the Morse code alphabet, and other pitch organization systems.

This thesis deals in particular with the pianist's approach to the Brahms Sonata for Piano and Violin in D Minor, Opus 108. There are two chapters, the first of which takes the form of a bibliography in which different theoretical aspects for consideration in the learning of the work are presented. One of the sections in the first chapter which is entitled The Pianist, should prove helpful to a prospective piano teacher, as well as a student of the Brahms Sonata in D Minor, Opus 10 8. In this section sources presenting different solutions to technical problems which the pianist is likely to encounter both generally, and specifically with regard to this Sonata, are listed. The other sections in this chapter include a discography and comments concerning recordings of the Sonata in D Minor, Opus 108, which a student of this work and its composer may consult. The second chapter of the thesis deals with specific issues involved in the interpretation based on my performance of the Sonata in D Minor, Opus 108, for the practical examination. Three other possible interpretations by well-known pianists are briefly evaluated. Attached to the thesis is a cassette tape on which recommendations for the practising of certain passages may be heard. / Thesis (M.Mus)-University of Natal, Durban, 1989.

Inside is the Sky is a musical composition for mezzo soprano and chamber orchestra. It is a collection of four songs using poems by renowned Canadian poet Lorna Crozier: A Summer's Singing, In Moonlight, Tautologies of Summer, and Inner Space. The composer wishes to connect music and poetry on a fundamental level. The approach is to write music that responds not to the mere surface of the poems, but rather to their central poetic themes, by means of parameters intrinsic to music: harmony, rhythm, melody, and registral expanse.