Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Kentucky, 1978. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 323-354) and index.

The Laborde Chansonnier (Wash.L.C. 2.1 L25 Case) is one of the most important but least studied of the Franco-Burgundian chansonniers of the fifteenth century. It contains 106 chansons, 22 of which are unica. / Fallows, Brown, Montagna, Kenney, Perkins and others have discussed the transformation of the style of the chanson over the course of the 15th century. Little has been written specifically on the period of the Laborde chansonnier. With reference to musical features such as melodic style, imitation, cadences, metrical structure, role of the contratenor, and range of note values, I discuss the style of the chansons, first in general, and then layer by layer, charting the changes in a crucial period. Although these changes are gradual, it is possible to follow the development of the chanson during the period between 1450 and the beginning of the sixteenth century. / The Laborde Chansonnier contains twenty-five unica, of which four have appeared in modern editions, and one of which is incomplete. I have transcribed the other twenty and also four other chansons which I could not find in modern editions. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

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In the past decade, the availability of digitally encoded, downloadable music has increased dramatically, pushed mainly by the release of the now famous MP3 compression format (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, 1994). Online sales of music in the US doubled in 2005, according to a recent news article (*), while the number of files exchanged on P2P platforms is much higher, but hard to estimate. The existing and coming informational flood in digital music prompts the need for sophisticated content-based information retrieval. Query-by-Humming is a prototypical technique aimed at locating pieces of music by melody; automatic annotation algorithms seek to enable finer search criteria, such as instruments, genre, or meter. Score transcription systems strive for an abstract, compressed form of a piece of music understandable by composers and musicians. Much research still has to be performed to achieve these goals. This thesis connects essential knowledge about music and human auditory perception with signal processing algorithms to solve the specific problem of pitch estimation. The designed algorithm obtains an estimate of the magnitude spectrum via STFT and models the harmonic structure of each pitch contained in the magnitude spectrum with Gaussian density mixtures, whose parameters are subsequently estimated via an Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. Heuristics for EM initialization are formulated mathematically. The system is implemented in MATLAB, featuring a GUI that provides for visual (spectrogram) and numerical (console) verification of results. The algorithm is tested using an array of data ranging from single to triple superposed instrument recordings. Its advantages and limitations are discussed, and a brief outlook over potential future research is given. (*) "Online and Wireless Music Sales Tripled in 2005"; Associated Press; January 19, 2006

String Music is a composition for string orchestra, percussion, and tape in three movements. The work exploits both traditional and contemporary polyphonic techniques (e.g. imitation, inversion, canon, stretto, fugue, collage). In addition, each movement employs a different musical elementas the focus of organization (timbre, pitch, rhythm/meter). The duration of the entire work is approximately eighteen and a half minutes.

In this thesis, we analyze the audio signal of a guitar to extract musical data in real-time. Specifically, the pitch and octave of notes and chords are displayed over time. Previous work has shown that non-negative matrix factorization is an effective method for classifying the pitches of simultaneous notes. We explore the effect of window size, hop length, and other parameters to maximize the resolution and accuracy of the output.Other groups have required prerecorded note samples to build a library of note templates to search for. We automate this step and compute the library at run-time, tuning it specifically for the input guitar. The program we present generates a musical visualization of the results in addition to suggestions for fingerings of chords in the form of a fretboard display and tablature notation. This program is built as an applet and is accessible from the web browser.

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<p>This thesis deals with the polyphonic and argumentative functions of the French negation marker, ne, in editorial texts from the daily press. The concept ‘polyphony’ relates to the presence of multiple voices within one and the same utterance. According to this view, negation triggers a subdivision of an utterance in two points of view. Thus the sentence Sweden will not be a part of the monetary union can be divided in two points of view, the underlying ‘Sweden will be a part of the monetary union’, and the explicit ‘Sweden will not be a part of the monetary union’.</p><p>First, I study the polyphonic structure of negative utterances, notably their division in two points of view, by taking into account their specific linguistic features. This is done so as to identify the relevant linguistic criteria that determine the polyphonic interpretation of the negation. The study demonstrates that contextual elements, including pragmatic connectors, presuppositions contrastive elements, and several other devices constitute the primary source of polyphonic markers.</p><p>Negation is furthermore approached from a textual perspective. I explore how the two opposite points of view that are associated with negation form polyphonic sequences with other points of view carrying the same semantic content, and how these dynamic points of view are associated to the different discourse beings that are found in the newspaper article. I found that these sequences often embrace the central polemic theme of the article and, also, that the polyphonic function is not restricted to the negative utterance but constitutes an element that ensures textual and argumentative coherence. These two analyses are carried out within Jean-Claude Anscombre’s and Oswald Ducrot’s Theory of Structural Argumentation, which has recently been formalised by Kjersti Fløttum, Coco Norén and Henning Nølke.</p><p>Finally in this thesis, I analyse the relation between the discourse beings associated with the negative utterance and real beings that exist outside the text, and then consider what rhetorical implications that correspondence or no correspondence has on the polyphonic interpretation of the negation. I also examine whether polyphonic negation can be considered to be a feature of newspaper editorials that identifies these texts as a genre. This study shows that the locuteur, the discourse being responsible for the enunciation of the negative utterance on a textual level, links to the real being, the editorial writer, who then refutes points of view associated to other discourse beings, often by use of nominalizations that refer to community voices. The locuteur also intrudes into an argument or claim, and refutes it in the name of a community or an authority.</p><p>By defining genre, as does the media researcher Patrick Charaudeau, as a correspondence between the constraints imposed by the discursive situation and the constraints imposed by the discursive features, and by considering that one of the editorial’s constraints is to persuade its readers, this study shows that the phrasal negation ne in its polyphonic function, constitutes a distinguishing feature in the genre of editorials. The refutations that are made by an editor constitute a distinctive argumentative strategy since it permits the editorial writer to present external points of view in order to refute them and thereby impose his or her own, subjective point of view.</p>

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / William H. Hsu / Pitch detection and instrument identification can be achieved with relatively high accuracy when considering monophonic signals in music; however, accurately classifying polyphonic signals in music remains an unsolved research problem. Pitch and instrument classification is a subset of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and automatic music transcription, both having numerous research and real-world applications. Several areas of research are covered in this thesis, including the fast Fourier transform, onset detection, convolution, and filtering. Basic music theory and terms are also presented in order to explain the context and structure of data used. The focus of this thesis is on the representation of musical signals in the frequency domain. Polyphonic signals with many different voices and frequencies can be exceptionally complex. This thesis presents a new model for representing the spectral structure of polyphonic signals: Uniform MAx Gaussian Envelope (UMAGE). The new spectral envelope precisely approximates the distribution of frequency parts in the spectrum while still being resilient to oscillating rapidly (noise) and is able to generalize well without losing the representation of the original spectrum. When subjectively compared to other spectral envelope methods, such as the linear predictive coding envelope method and the cepstrum envelope method, UMAGE is able to model high order polyphonic signals without dropping partials (frequencies present in the signal). In other words, UMAGE is able to model a signal independent of the signal’s periodicity. The performance of UMAGE is evaluated both objectively and subjectively. It is shown that UMAGE is robust at modeling the distribution of frequencies in simple and complex polyphonic signals. Combined classification (combiners), a methodology for learning large concepts, is used to simplify the learning process and boost classification results. The output of each learner is then averaged to get the final result. UMAGE is less accurate when identifying pitches; however, it is able to achieve accuracy in identifying instrument groups on order-10 polyphonic signals (ten voices), which is competitive with the current state of the field.