The purpose of this treatise is to discuss tone production on the piano, specifically focusing on the research of Otto Rudolph Ortmann, whose work marked a turning point in the history of piano pedagogy and set a new standard for piano-related scholarship. Writing in the early twentieth century, Ortmann, who was both an accomplished pianist and an avid scientist, was one of the first to consciously and meticulously combine the two fields. Today, Ortmann's books are mostly out of print and his research is little known by the average piano student or teacher. However, Ortmann's books greatly affected and influenced many of his contemporaries, and no matter how neglected today, they contain a wealth of information and practical advice highly relevant to any serious pianist. While his research spans a range of topics, including the science of piano acoustics, experiments and scientific explanations of piano technique, and even music education, his work focusing on piano tone production was perhaps the most controversial. In this treatise, Ortmann's concepts, experiments, and conclusions related to tone production will be discussed. Certain scientific elements related to tone production, such as the acoustics of sound, the mechanism of the piano, and the relevant aspects of basic physics, will serve as an introduction to this discussion. A historical overview of the pedagogical trends surrounding the subject will show how Ortmann's work has been sometimes overlooked and often misinterpreted. A thorough analysis of Ortmann's research will demonstrate its balanced approach and its indispensable relevance to the modern pianist and pedagogue. Finally, his work will be used as a vantage point to shed light on subsequent trends of piano pedagogy and to ask questions about the role of tone production in modern pianism. / text

It has recently become more common to combine methodologies from the fields of ethnomusicology and psychoacoustics to address fundamental questions concerning music perception. Ethnomusicology emphasizes cultural context when examining the different ways musical sounds are organized. Psychoacoustics explores the relationships between perceptual processes and physical properties of sound. The methodologies of both disciplines are crucial in developing a cross-cultural cognitive theory of music. A perception experiment was performed on two groups of Western musicians: one with training in Javanese gamelan music (the Gamelan group), and one without training in Javanese gamelan (the Western group). This study examined whether changes in timbre perception occurred in adults who were trained in another culture's music compared to naive listeners. The two groups' perceptions were also compared between an isolated tone and a melodic context to determine where the effects of training were most salient. A mathematical technique known as Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) showed that all subjects based their ratings on two factors during both contexts. In the isolated tone context, the two subject groups did not differ in their timbre perception. In the melodic context, the subject groups diverged in a statistically significant manner. Multiple regression analysis showed that in the isolated tone context, attack centroid (a measure of the spectral energy distribution during the initial 50 milliseconds of the tone) was emphasized almost equally by both groups, along with an unknown psychological factor. In the melodic context, the Gamelan group focused their attention almost completely on the attack centroid while the Western group focused their attention roughly the same between the attack centroid and the middle portion of the amplitude envelope. These results indicate that timbre perception in the music of another culture is modified when a listener has received training in that music, even as an adult. A musical context is needed for these modifications to become apparent, however, otherwise training has no effect on processing timbre. It would appear that attention is directed to acoustical properties that provide meaning to a musical context by those listeners who are familiar with that context. Conversely, listeners who are naive of another culture's musical contexts do not focus their attention on those specific acoustical properties.

Dažnai ieškoti bendraminčių ir burtis į muzikinį kolektyvą skatina nuogirdos apie ypatingus, visiškai kitokius muzikuojančių žmonių santykius. Todėl šiame tyrime siekta sužinoti, kokie yra sutrikusio intelekto suaugusiųjų muzikinio ugdymo ypatumai grupėje „Spalvų orkestro” atveju. Tyrimo tikslas – išanalizuoti sutrikusio intelekto suaugusiųjų muzikavimo kolektyve ypatumus. Uždaviniai - teoriškai pagrįsti sutrikusio intelekto suaugusiųjų muzikinio ugdymo grupėje prielaidas, ištirti sutrikusio intelekto suaugusiųjų muzikinio ugdymo „Spalvų orkestre“ ypatumus ir išsiaiškinti sutrikusio intelekto suaugusiųjų tėvų/globėjų požiūrį į kolektyvinį muzikavimą. Tyrimas buvo atliktas Vilniaus „Spalvų orkestre“, kuriame groja sutrikusio intelekto suaugusieji. Tyrimo metu buvo apklausti „Spalvų orkestro“ vadovai, orkestro narių tėvai ir patys orkestro nariai. Taikyti stebėjimo, interviu ir anketinės apklausos raštu metodai. Tyrimo metu išaiškėjo, jog Lietuvoje skatinamas mokymasis visą gyvenimą, ypač svarbus negalią turintiems suaugusiems. „Spalvų orkestro“ lankymas padeda sutrikusio intelekto suaugusiems integruotis į visuomenę, skatina neįgaliųjų iniciatyvą, formuoja jų socialinius įgūdžius. Pastebėta, kad lankant „Spalvų orkestro“ repeticijas, orkestro nariai išmoksta groti muzikos instrumentu, pažinti natas, lavina dainavimo, grojimo, ritmo pojūčio įgūdžius, klausą, mokosi išreikšti emocijas pagal muzikinį kūrinį, susipažįsta su muzikiniais terminais ir juos naudoja muzikuojant... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Often find partners in musical ensemble encourages rumor about a special, completely different musicians human relations. Therefore, this study aimed to find out what is mentally retarded adult music education characteristics of "Color Orchestra“ case study. The aim - analyze music collective features of mentally retarded adults. Tasks - theoretically justify music education of mentally retarded adult group assumptions, explore the music education features of mentally retarded adult in "Color Orchestra“ and find out the approach of parents/ guardians about „Color Orchestra“ features. The study was carried out in Vilnius „Color Orchestra“, which plays mentally retarded adults. The study has been questioned "Color Orchestra" leaders, members of the orchestra parents and band members. Apply observation, interviews and a written questionnaire methods. The study revealed that Lithuania promote lifelong learning, critical disability in adults. "Color Orchestra“ visits to help adults with intellectual disabilities to integrate into society, promotes disability initiative forms, their social skills. It is noted that while visiting "Color Orchestra“ rehearsals, orchestra members learn to play a musical instrument, read music, develop singing, playing, sense of rhythm skills, hearing, learn to express emotions by musical composition, familiar with musical terms and use them while playing. Mentally retarded adults make friends, gain more skills to communicate in a group, to manage... [to full text]

The sustained increase in computing performance over the last decades has brought enough computing power to perform significant audio processing in affordable personal computers. Following this revolution, we have witnessed a series of improvements in sound transformation techniques and the introduction of numerous digital audio effects to modify effectively the time, pitch, and loudness dimensions of audio signals. Due to the complex and multi-dimensional nature of timbre however, it is significantly more difficult to achieve meaningful and convincing qualitative transformations. The tools currently available for timbre modifications (e.g. equalizers) do not operate along perceptually meaningful axes of singing voice timbre (e.g. breathiness, roughness, etc.) resulting in a transformation control problem. One of the goals of this work is to examine more intuitive procedures to achieve high-fidelity qualitative transformations explicitly controlling certain dimensions of singing voice timbre. Quantitative measurements (i.e. voice timbre descriptors) are introduced and used as high-level controls in an adaptive processing system dependent on the characteristics observed in the input signal. / The transformation methods use a harmonic plus noise representation from which voice timbre descriptors are derived. This higher-level representation, closer to our perception of voice timbre, offers more intuitive controls over timbre transformations. The topics of parametric voice modeling and timbre descriptor computation are first introduced, followed by a study of the acoustical impacts of voice breathiness variations. A timbre transformation system operating specifically on the singing voice quality is then introduced with accompanying software implementations, including an example digital audio effect for the control and modification of the breathiness quality on normal voices.

Timbre is a multidimensional attribute of sound and depends to a large extent on its spectral content. The evaluation and control of timbre is a task commonly performed by sound engineers, loudspeaker designers, and subjects participating in listening tests on the quality of transmitted and reproduced sound. Such listening tasks require specific listening abilities. / This dissertation presents a training method that aims at developing memory for timbre, sensitivity to timbre changes, and listening strategies involving disciplined auditory attention and efficiency. The physical timbre space is divided into categories defined by the center frequency of standard octave and third-octave resonances. This simplification of the physical timbre space allows the memorization of a limited set of perceptual timbre categories or references that can be used to evaluate other timbres. / The proposed method combines the use of computer software for the presentation and evaluation of exercises and individual tutoring sessions with an instructor. The software monitors the actions of listeners during equalization adjustment tasks and allows data to be collected on the sequence of problem solving operators that are used. Performance indicators can thus be compiled and used for the assessment of skill level achieved by the listeners. A global performance index is proposed. / A listening test involving the adjustment of multiple peaks and dips in a sound's spectrum is presented, in which the performance of a group of experienced professionals involved in sound recording and audio post-production was compared with a group of student subjects with comparatively little listening experience but who were trained with the method described in the present work for a period of 6 months. Results indicate that overall the experimental student group outperformed the control group of professionals. Suggestions for further improvement of the training method and performance level assessment are proposed.

With the volume of digital media available today, automatic music recommendation services have proven a useful tool for consumers, allowing them to better discover new and enjoyable music. Typically, this technology is based on collaborative filtering techniques, employing human-generated metadata to base recommendations. Recently, work in content-based recommendation systems have emerged in which the audio signal itself is analyzed for relevant musical information from which models are built that attempt to mimic human similarity judgments. The current state-of-the-art for content-based music recommendation uses a timbre model based on MFCCs calculated on short segments of tracks. These feature vectors are then modeled using GMMs (Gaussian mixture models). GMM modeling of frame-based MFCCs has been shown to perform fairly well on timbre similarity tasks. However, a common problem is that of hubs , in which a relative small number of songs falsely appear similar to many other songs, significantly decreasing the accuracy of similarity recommendations. In this thesis, we explore the origins of hubs in timbre-based modeling and propose several remedies. Specifically, we find that a process of model homogenization, in which certain components of a mixture model are systematically removed, improves performance as measured against several ground-truth similarity metrics. Extending the work of Aucouturier, we introduce several new methods of homogenization. On a subset of the uspop data set, model homogenization improves artist R-precision by a maximum of 3.5% and agreement to user collection co-occurrence data by 7.4%. We also find differences in the effectiveness of the various homogenization methods for hub reduction, with the proposed methods providing the best results. Further, we extend the modeling of frame-based MFCC features by using a kernel density estimation approach to non-parametric modeling. We find that such an approach significantly reduces the number of hubs (by 2.6% of the dataset) while improving agreement to ground-truth by 5% and slightly improving artist R-precision as compared with the standard parametric model. Finally, to test whether these principles hold for all musical data, we introduce an entirely new data set consisting of Indian classical music. We find that our results generalize here as well, suggesting that hubness is a general feature of timbre-based similarity music modeling and that the techniques presented to improve this modeling are effective for diverse types of music.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1996. / Issued also on microfilm. Includes tables. Sponsor: Lenore M. Pogonowski. Dissertation Committee: Harold F. Abeles. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 123-125).

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It has recently become more common to combine methodologies from the fields of ethnomusicology and psychoacoustics to address fundamental questions concerning music perception. Ethnomusicology emphasizes cultural context when examining the different ways musical sounds are organized. Psychoacoustics explores the relationships between perceptual processes and physical properties of sound. The methodologies of both disciplines are crucial in developing a cross-cultural cognitive theory of music. A perception experiment was performed on two groups of Western musicians: one with training in Javanese gamelan music (the Gamelan group), and one without training in Javanese gamelan (the Western group). This study examined whether changes in timbre perception occurred in adults who were trained in another culture's music compared to naive listeners. The two groups' perceptions were also compared between an isolated tone and a melodic context to determine where the effects of training were most salient. A mathematical technique known as Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) showed that all subjects based their ratings on two factors during both contexts. In the isolated tone context, the two subject groups did not differ in their timbre perception. In the melodic context, the subject groups diverged in a statistically significant manner. Multiple regression analysis showed that in the isolated tone context, attack centroid (a measure of the spectral energy distribution during the initial 50 milliseconds of the tone) was emphasized almost equally by both groups, along with an unknown psychological factor. In the melodic context, the Gamelan group focused their attention almost completely on the attack centroid while the Western group focused their attention roughly the same between the attack centroid and the middle portion of the amplitude envelope. These results indicate that timbre perception in the music of another culture is modified when a listener has received training in that music, even as an adult. A musical context is needed for these modifications to become apparent, however, otherwise training has no effect on processing timbre. It would appear that attention is directed to acoustical properties that provide meaning to a musical context by those listeners who are familiar with that context. Conversely, listeners who are naive of another culture's musical contexts do not focus their attention on those specific acoustical properties. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

Resonant singing creates possibilities with dynamic shading, subtlety of phrasing, and rich vibrant tone that astonishes listeners. Choral singing that employs resonance as a fundamental ensemble virtue yields impressive results that lend themselves well to the varying demands of any choral score. Fortunately, choruses of every level can benefit from an increased understanding of the basic principles of resonance in the singing voice. Research on issues of upper partial energy and the presence of the singer's formant in a choral ensemble has been limited in approach. Many published studies regarding upper partial energy in the choral ensemble are based on what the ensemble is already doing, which is linked to the teaching of that specific director and that specific choir. Research must include a wider range of aesthetic choices with regard to choral unification. Through examining spectrograms that represent the sound of some of the most renowned choirs, it is possible to see that many of these ensembles are producing tone that contains a high level of upper formant energy. Interviews with established conductors reveal approaches and teaching methodologies that reinforce this type of singing. It is possible to teach the individuals in a choir to increase the level of resonance in their voices, creating a collective sound containing a vibrancy that is easier to tune and unify. This paper explores resonance in choral singing by first explaining the basic principles of sound production, then defining a resonant tone as one containing the strong presence in the upper partials generally associated with classically trained singers, and finally discussing how this type of resonance is developed in choirs.