Inaug.-Diss.--Heidelberg. / Lebenslauf. Includes bibliographical references.

Most extended instrumental playing techniques are still deprived of a conventional method of notation. In order to facilitate the utilisation of these unconventional musical elements, a coherent and consistent notation system is developed in this thesis. It comprises chapters on string instruments, wind instruments, percussion instruments, plucked instruments and keyboard instruments. A systematic notation of unconventional instrumental playing techniques has not yet been attempted, nor have all tech-niques subject to this work yet been explained in detail. In order to coherently depict unconventional playing techniques, a set of criteria is defined. These criteria postulate that all developments are supposed to be 1. As exact as possible and 2. As simple as possible while the system may 3. Not be contradictory to traditional notation, but should instead extend and be closely related to it. Further, in order to guarantee that the additions are consistent, they need to be compatible with, and distinct from, all other signs of the system. Each unconventional playing technique is classified and explained in detail. Subsequently, previous methods of its notation are presented and discussed with regard to the previously defined criteria. Finally, a suggestion for the notation that agrees with the postulations is provided. In the next step the application of the developments is then described by presenting examples from compositions that were either produced during the writing of the thesis or revised by replacing old methods of notation with the developments from this thesis. Altogether examples from eight instrumental works that employ the new methods are displayed.

Thesis (M.S.)--Georgia State University, 2005. / Ying Zhu, committee chair; Rajsekhar Sunderraman, Xaolin Hu, committee members. Electronic text ( 82 p. : ill. (some col.)) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed July 5, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-54).

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of a software application for guided practice on a tablet computer used as a multisensory instructional tool in the process of teaching music staff notation to students who have dyslexia. Between 15 to 20% of people in the United States may have dyslexia or related learning differences in the form of difficulties with reading and language processing. Having dyslexia does not preclude engagement in playing music; however, evidence shows students with dyslexia often have trouble learning how to read music notation (Ganschow, Lloyd-Jones & Miles, 1994; Miles & Westcombe, 2004; Stewart, 2008). Technology, specifically the tablet computer, has potential to address individual needs of students in the domain of music; a variety of applications have been created for teaching and practicing the recognition of musical notation. The theoretical framework underlying the study was based on two theories related to the learning process of students with dyslexia: the phonological deficit and the dyslexia automatization deficit theories. A quasi-experimental design was employed using intact classes of third, fourth, and fifth grade students (N=72) who attended an academy for students with dyslexia. The students were taught a series of lessons on reading music staff notation for seven weeks. The same teacher taught all classes. The treatment classes were given time for the guided-practice of music staff notation on the tablet; the control classes used the tablets for the same amount of time with other music applications, but were not given access to the specific treatment program. Data used to tabulate results of the study were collected with the use of pre and posttests of music staff notation recognition. The overall conclusion was that the use of the tablet for guided-practice in conjunction with instruction was significantly more effective at increasing the ability of students to recognize musical staff notation than using instruction alone.

The thesis summarizes the research in application of statistical methods of computational linguistics in music processing and explains theoretical background of these applications. In the second part methods of symbolic melody extraction are explored. A corpus of approxi- mately 400 hours of melodies of different music styles was created. A melody model using the language modeling techniques was trained on this corpus. In the third part of the thesis the model is used for an attempt to develop an alternative method of audio melody extraction which uses the melody model instead of commonly used heuristics and rules. The chosen ap- proach works well only on simple input data and produces worse results than the commonly used methods on the MIREX contest data. On the other hand, the experiments help to understand the conceptual between the pitch frequency development - the physical melody - and the melody perceived on an abstract level in the symbolic notation - the symbolic melody. 1

Throughout the history of public school music in the United States, one of the problems which has continually been in the foreground is that of music reading, It is primarily a problem for the elementary school as that is the place where reading must begin in order for the children's interest and ability to be balanced. The elementary school is the focal point for the teaching of all skills and tools in learning. Certainly, reading is one of the major tools in the process of musical learning. In many cases the ability of the students to read music has been the basic criterion of the entire music program. Davison states that the aim and end of a large percentage of instruction has for so long been to train students to sing music at sight that it has grown to be a fetish. While such a standard as that is an over-emphasis of reading, most music educators will agree that the place of music reading in the elementary school is of utmost importance. The differences of opinions lie not so much in the goals to be reached as in the methods of reaching them. The purpose of this study is not to weigh these various methods as to their usefulness. It is rather to survey as many publications as possible concerning the teaching of music reading in the elementary school and to make a digest of the opinions found in them. In agreement with Mursell's statement that anything can be taught effectively in a considerable number of ways,2 it is the writer's belief that there is no one best method for teaching music reading. The desired outcome of this study is to present an adequate digest of the material published about various methods in order that these lines of thought may be followed as they are needed to fit individual teaching problems.

O presente trabalho investiga as diculdades enfrentadas por decientes visuais ao ingressarem em um curso de nvel superior em Música, onde a troca de informacão musical escrita é frequente e se dá por meio de partituras impressas em tinta, e a conversão deste material para braille demanda conhecimentos específicos e disponibilidade de recursos. Igualmente problemática, a produção musical do aluno cego é feita em braille, seja para tomar nota de aulas como para realizar tarefas de disciplinas como Contraponto, Harmonia e Análise Musical, ou mesmo para a realização de exames. Claramente, esse material deve passar por um processo de conversão para que o professor possa avaliar o aluno, entre outros motivos. O foco principal da pesquisa realizada é a analise da musicografia braille sob a ótica das possibilidades de se produzir transcrições automáticas entre partituras em braille e tinta, a fim de prover recursos tecnológicos direcionados a solução deste problema. Para tanto, foi desenvolvido um aplicativo capaz de receber informação musical em braille e converê-la para o formato MusicXML, adequado para a leitura a partir de outros aplicativos de notação musical e, consequentemente, a impressão deste material em tinta. Este programa esta sendo distribudo como software livre sob licenca LGPL, contrapondo-se as suas alternativas hoje existentes no mercado. O aplicativo desenvolvido foi utilizado e avaliado por usuarios decientes visuais e com visão normal por meio de um questionário. Os dados foram então analisados, buscando mapear as diferenças nas experiências de uso e verificar necessidades de melhorias e novas funcionalidades, buscando com isso o aprofundamento nas questões pertinentes ao problema e dando suporte a novas pesquisas relativas ao assunto. / This work researches visually-impaired person\'s dificulties when studying music as a university career, where musical information is usually forwarded as ink-printed sheet music and the translation of this material to braille involves specic skills and resource availability. In that sense, the musical production demanded from a blind student is accomplished by using braille notation, for taking notes or producing homework for disciplines like Harmony, Musical Analysis, or even to take tests. Clearly the information produced has to be submitted to a conversion process, and finally it can be reviewed by the professor or other students. The main focus of this research is the understanding of braille music aspects and the problem of generating automatic ink-printed sheet music transcriptions, providing assistive resource for music students. For attaining this goal, an application was developed in order to receive braille music input and translate it to MusicXML format, which can be read by any of the widely MusicXML compatible softwares available for reading, editing and printing music. The program is distributed as free software under LGPL license, as opposed to currently available alternatives. The resulting application was tested by visually-impaired and non-visually impaired users, and reviewed trough the application of a survey. The collected data was analyzed, in search for variations on user experience and checking for software improvement needs, as well as uncovering further relevant matters on this subject.

ScoreSVG implements a three-tiered software architecture that generates musical scores in scalable vector graphics (SVG), something no other known music editor has done. SVG is non-proprietary XML-based format that renders graphical content into a web browser equipped with a SVG plugin. Scores in SVG can be scripted to produce interactive music theory examples, or make other graphical score changes impossible in any other format. Large music score editors such as Finale and Sibelius output to proprietary file formats, or Postscript (.ps) files that are not interchangeable or modifiable once created. Open source efforts such as LilyPond or Guido require the user to learn a new text-based music format to get a PostScript music score. ScoreSVG converts the data from a user-friendly visual front end to GuidoXML, capturing the semantic meaning of the score, and then outputs the result in SVG using an XSL stylesheet and the Saxon 8.4 XSLT processor.

No description available.

O presente trabalho investiga as diculdades enfrentadas por decientes visuais ao ingressarem em um curso de nvel superior em Música, onde a troca de informacão musical escrita é frequente e se dá por meio de partituras impressas em tinta, e a conversão deste material para braille demanda conhecimentos específicos e disponibilidade de recursos. Igualmente problemática, a produção musical do aluno cego é feita em braille, seja para tomar nota de aulas como para realizar tarefas de disciplinas como Contraponto, Harmonia e Análise Musical, ou mesmo para a realização de exames. Claramente, esse material deve passar por um processo de conversão para que o professor possa avaliar o aluno, entre outros motivos. O foco principal da pesquisa realizada é a analise da musicografia braille sob a ótica das possibilidades de se produzir transcrições automáticas entre partituras em braille e tinta, a fim de prover recursos tecnológicos direcionados a solução deste problema. Para tanto, foi desenvolvido um aplicativo capaz de receber informação musical em braille e converê-la para o formato MusicXML, adequado para a leitura a partir de outros aplicativos de notação musical e, consequentemente, a impressão deste material em tinta. Este programa esta sendo distribudo como software livre sob licenca LGPL, contrapondo-se as suas alternativas hoje existentes no mercado. O aplicativo desenvolvido foi utilizado e avaliado por usuarios decientes visuais e com visão normal por meio de um questionário. Os dados foram então analisados, buscando mapear as diferenças nas experiências de uso e verificar necessidades de melhorias e novas funcionalidades, buscando com isso o aprofundamento nas questões pertinentes ao problema e dando suporte a novas pesquisas relativas ao assunto. / This work researches visually-impaired person\'s dificulties when studying music as a university career, where musical information is usually forwarded as ink-printed sheet music and the translation of this material to braille involves specic skills and resource availability. In that sense, the musical production demanded from a blind student is accomplished by using braille notation, for taking notes or producing homework for disciplines like Harmony, Musical Analysis, or even to take tests. Clearly the information produced has to be submitted to a conversion process, and finally it can be reviewed by the professor or other students. The main focus of this research is the understanding of braille music aspects and the problem of generating automatic ink-printed sheet music transcriptions, providing assistive resource for music students. For attaining this goal, an application was developed in order to receive braille music input and translate it to MusicXML format, which can be read by any of the widely MusicXML compatible softwares available for reading, editing and printing music. The program is distributed as free software under LGPL license, as opposed to currently available alternatives. The resulting application was tested by visually-impaired and non-visually impaired users, and reviewed trough the application of a survey. The collected data was analyzed, in search for variations on user experience and checking for software improvement needs, as well as uncovering further relevant matters on this subject.