Ao longo das últimas três décadas observamos o progressivo interesse que a semiótica da canção popular desenvolvida por Luiz Tatit a partir da semiótica greimasiana vem despertando no meio acadêmico. Situada na fronteira dos domínios da lingüística e da música, e justamente por isso, a canção se apresenta como um objeto de difícil análise. Teorias específicas para o componente verbal e musical raramente se compatibilizam a ponto de permitirem uma análise homogênea. O êxito obtido até agora pela semiótica greimasiana pode em parte ser explicado por sua forte vocação para a multidisciplinaridade, a despeito de sua origem e tradição lingüística. Em suas formulações iniciais foram considerados apenas alguns parâmetros musicais que estruturam a melodia da canção. Dessa maneira, poderíamos afirmar que em um primeiro momento a canção foi considerada uma palavra cantada, opondo-se a palavra falada da nossa fala cotidiana. Percebemos que parte dos esforços dos pesquisadores que se dedicam ao desenvolvimento dessa teoria consiste em tentar incorporar cada vez mais elementos musicais. A partir de uma revisão crítica da literatura atual, esse trabalho discute e propõe procedimentos de semiotização do material musical, especialmente no que se refere ao timbre e às questões de harmonia. Para garantir a coerência necessária com os fundamentos da teoria, propusemos a distinção entre o discurso da produção musical e o discurso musical propriamente dito, discutimos a relação entre plano da expressão e plano do conteúdo no discurso musical, assim como sua organização hierárquica. Dentro dessa diversidade de assuntos e abordagens, elegemos como fio condutor do trabalho a obra cancional de Chico Buarque, que representa a um só tempo a fonte de indagações e a sustentação dos resultados obtidos. / Throughout the last three decades it has been observed the increasing interest of the academic environment on the semiotic theory of popular song developed by Luiz Tatit, based on greimasian semiotics. Situated midway between linguistics and music, and exactly because of that, songs are difficult to analyse. Specific theories for the verbal and the musical components are rarely compatible enough to allow an homogeneous analysis. The success achieved so far by greimasian semiotics can in part be explained by its strong multidisciplinary vocation , in spite of its linguistic origin. In its initial formulation, only musical parameters that structuralyze the songs melody had been considered. Therefore, it could be said that, at first, the song was considered a \"sung word\", as opposed to the \"spoken word\" of our daily speech. Part of the efforts of the researchers dedicated to the development of this theory consists in trying to incorporate increasingly more musical elements. Based on a critical review of the current literature, the present work discusses and proposes semiotization procedures of the musical material, especially timbre and harmony aspects. To guarantee the necessary coherence with the theorys foundations, we propose the distinction between the speech of musical production and the musical speech per se; we discuss the relationship between expression and content in the musical speech, as well as its hierarchic organization. Within this diversity of subjects and approaches, we chose the songs composed by Chico Buarque as a guideline, as a source of the investigation as well as a support of the results.

Cochlear implants (CIs) provide coarse representations of pitch, which are adequate for speech but not for music. Despite increasing interest in music processing by CI users, the available information is fragmentary. The present experiment attempted to fill this void by conducting a comprehensive assessment of music processing in adult CI users. CI users (n =6) and normally hearing (NH) controls (n = 12) were tested on several tasks involving melody and rhythm perception, recognition of familiar music, and emotion of recognition in speech and music. CI performance was substantially poorer than NH performance and at chance levels on pitch processing tasks. Performance was highly variable, however, with one individual achieving NH performance levels on some tasks, probably because of low-frequency residual hearing in his unimplanted ear. Future research with a larger sample of CI users can shed light on factors associated with good and poor music processing in this population.

Cochlear implants (CIs) provide coarse representations of pitch, which are adequate for speech but not for music. Despite increasing interest in music processing by CI users, the available information is fragmentary. The present experiment attempted to fill this void by conducting a comprehensive assessment of music processing in adult CI users. CI users (n =6) and normally hearing (NH) controls (n = 12) were tested on several tasks involving melody and rhythm perception, recognition of familiar music, and emotion of recognition in speech and music. CI performance was substantially poorer than NH performance and at chance levels on pitch processing tasks. Performance was highly variable, however, with one individual achieving NH performance levels on some tasks, probably because of low-frequency residual hearing in his unimplanted ear. Future research with a larger sample of CI users can shed light on factors associated with good and poor music processing in this population.

This thesis acts as a first step in connecting the sub jective description of piano tone with quantitative measurements of changes in the vibrational and acoustical properties of a piano. Voicing techniques used by piano technicians are applied to a fully strung test piano and a series of tests are undertaken to measure the effect they have on piano tone. The addition of weights and riblets to a piano soundboard, two commonly practiced methods used to change the tone of a piano and even out the transition between the low tenor and high bass bridges, are examined in detail in this thesis. Modal analysis is the first test method applied and is used to determine the mode shapes and the modal properties of the test soundboard. The addition of small masses and riblets is shown to have the ability to change modal properties to varying degrees and connections are made between the output sound, attachment locations, modification locations, and mode shapes of the soundboard. A new technique, piano tone mapping, is introduced as a visualization method that displays the harmonic structure of the entire piano in one image. Using the technique creates a unique fingerprint of a piano that can be compared in various ways to other pianos. The piano tone maps reveal that initial magnitude and decay rate of the output sound are both decreased for notes with attachment points close to modification locations where weights and riblets are added. Impedance testing is also conducted for a number of different modifications. These tests reveal that riblets and weights each have their own frequency bands of influence, with the weights creating impedance changes primarily below 800 Hz and riblets creating impedance changes above 500 Hz, with a region of overlap between 500 Hz and 800 Hz. Tests also revealed that changes in impedance created by these voicing techniques were local in effect, with a region of influence less than 10 cm in radius extending from the location where the weight or riblet is attached.

This thesis acts as a first step in connecting the sub jective description of piano tone with quantitative measurements of changes in the vibrational and acoustical properties of a piano. Voicing techniques used by piano technicians are applied to a fully strung test piano and a series of tests are undertaken to measure the effect they have on piano tone. The addition of weights and riblets to a piano soundboard, two commonly practiced methods used to change the tone of a piano and even out the transition between the low tenor and high bass bridges, are examined in detail in this thesis. Modal analysis is the first test method applied and is used to determine the mode shapes and the modal properties of the test soundboard. The addition of small masses and riblets is shown to have the ability to change modal properties to varying degrees and connections are made between the output sound, attachment locations, modification locations, and mode shapes of the soundboard. A new technique, piano tone mapping, is introduced as a visualization method that displays the harmonic structure of the entire piano in one image. Using the technique creates a unique fingerprint of a piano that can be compared in various ways to other pianos. The piano tone maps reveal that initial magnitude and decay rate of the output sound are both decreased for notes with attachment points close to modification locations where weights and riblets are added. Impedance testing is also conducted for a number of different modifications. These tests reveal that riblets and weights each have their own frequency bands of influence, with the weights creating impedance changes primarily below 800 Hz and riblets creating impedance changes above 500 Hz, with a region of overlap between 500 Hz and 800 Hz. Tests also revealed that changes in impedance created by these voicing techniques were local in effect, with a region of influence less than 10 cm in radius extending from the location where the weight or riblet is attached.

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

Acoustic features of sound such as pitch, loudness, perceived duration and timbre have been shown to be related to emotion in regard to sound, demonstrating that an important connection between the perceived emotions and their timbres is lacking. This study investigates the relationship between acoustic features of sound and emotion in regard to timbre. In two experiments we investigated whether particular acoustic components of sound can predict timbre, and particular categories of emotion, and how these attributes are related. Two behavioral experiments related perceived emotion ratings with synthetically created sounds and International Affective Digitized Sounds (Bradley & Lang, 2007) sounds. Also, two timbre experiments found acoustic components of synthetically created sounds, and IADS. Regression analyses uncovered some relationships between emotion, timbre, and acoustic features of sound. Results indicate that emotion is perceived differently for synthetic instrumental sounds and IADS. Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients were a strong predictor of perceived emotion of instrumental sounds; however, this was not the case for the IADS. This difference lends itself to the idea that there is a strong relationship between emotion and timbre for instrumental sounds, perhaps in part because of their relationship to speech and the way these different sounds are processed.

Thesis (DMus.)--University of Alberta, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis examines the music of contemporary British progressive rock artist Steven Wilson and explores the ways in which specific musical influences have informed and shaped his work. Wilson’s solo output is extremely eclectic and draws from a plethora of diverse genres including progressive rock, electronica, metal, drone, pop, jazz, and industrial. Although it would be impossible to trace all of the influences involved in Wilson’s unique musical idiolect, I study the influence of three seminal tracks upon his work: progressive rock band King Crimson’s “The Court of the Crimson King” (1969), electronica duo Boards of Canada’s “An Eagle in Your Mind” (1998), and progressive death metal group Opeth’s “Blackwater Park” (2001). I demonstrate how Wilson’s recordings share timbral and formal features with these earlier works and consider the analytic implications through the lens of genre theory. The findings are then synthesized through a focused analysis of Wilson’s “Ancestral” (2015) in order to explore genre fusion and demonstrate how these salient musical features are integrated within a single song. This project ultimately seeks to situate Wilson within the progressive rock tradition, consider the role of timbre and form in popular music genres, and investigate the complex relationship between genre and influence.

Many skilled flutists place a high priority on "good" tone quality, or timbre. Timbre can be defined as the audible difference in character that a listener perceives for two notes played at the same pitch. Different timbres are determined by the combination and balance of harmonics that comprise a note. Unlike pitch and rhythm, timbre is difficult to objectively quantify. This project explores (1) how tone quality is described by skilled flutists, (2) whether the harmonic spectrum has some correlation with tone quality, (3) whether certain harmonic spectra are preferred, or considered "good". Thirty-one flutists ranging from high school students to professionals were recorded. A set of samples was used in surveys and interviews to capture descriptors and ratings of tone quality. All of the recorded samples were analyzed using application programs, Harmonic Analysis Tools (HAT), created for this study. HAT uses digital signal processing techniques to produce "spectral signatures". The signatures consist of the harmonic content, pitch, and amplitude of a sample. In the future, with further development, HAT may be a useful tool for musicians for tone development in the practice room. The outcome of this research is a baseline set of some often used descriptors. In addition, results showed some correlation between harmonic spectra and descriptors. There were also trends in preferences with respect to certain spectral characteristics. An unexpected finding was that University students showed divergent timbre preferences compared to highly experienced flutists.