As the bassoon has evolved over time, the music written for the instrument has evolved around it, and was many times the catalyst for its evolution. Bassoon music of the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries has defined much of the curricula for bassoon studies, and has established how we consider and experience the bassoon. We experience, write, and consume music in vastly different ways than just a generation ago. Humans use technology for the most basic of tasks. Composers are using the technology of our generation to compose music that is a reflection of our time. This is a significant aspect of art music today, and bassoonists are barely participating in the creation of this new repertoire. Performance practice often considers only the musical score; interactive electronic music regularly goes beyond that. The combination of technological challenges and inexperience can make approaching electroacoustic music a daunting and inaccessible type of music for bassoonists. These issues require a different language to the performance practice: one that addresses music, amplification, computer software, hardware, the collaboration between performer and technology, and often the performer and composer. The author discusses problems that performers face when rehearsing and performing interactive electroacoustic works for bassoon, and offers some solutions.

Providing standards for music technology use in community college music programs presents both challenges and opportunities for educators in American higher education. A need exists to assess the current use of technology at the community college level for the purpose of improving instruction. Although limited research has been done on the use of technology to support music education K- 12 and in four-year universities, little research on the problem in the community college setting was found. This research employed a Delphi study, a method for the systematic solicitation and collection of professional judgments on a particular subject, to examine existing criteria, “best practices”, and standards, in an effort to develop a set of standards specifically for the community college level. All aspects of a complete music program were considered including: curriculum, staffing, equipment, materials/software, facilities and workforce competencies. The panel of experts, comprised of community college educators from throughout the nation, reached consensus on 50 of the 57 standards. Forty-one or 82%, were identified as minimal standards for the application of music technology in music education. Community college music educators, planning to successfully utilize music technology to improve teaching and learning should implement the 41 standards determined as minimal by the Delphi panel. As the use of music technology grows in our community college programs, the standards used to define the success of these programs will expand and mature through further research.

Os objetos de estudo específicos deste trabalho são as práticas e os processos de criação e performance de música experimental interativa desenvolvidos na última década no ambiente de pesquisas em sonologia da Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Optamos por realizar uma abordagem ampla destes objetos por entender que o contexto sociocultural no qual ocorrem cria as condições para sua realização e é, de alguma forma, refletido em suas produções. O início do trabalho é dedicado aos contextos gerais e são analisadas questões e características relevantes das sociedades contemporâneas, nas quais, dentre diversos outros processos dinâmicos e plurais, se ampliou o foco de estudo sobre as criações artísticas, englobando também o ambiente sociocultural no qual tais produções são desenvolvidas. Em seguida, observamos o contexto específico da área de sonologia da USP, representada atualmente pelo Núcleo de Pesquisas em Sonologia (NuSom), e sobre como o vínculo entre os participantes (que pode ser estabelecido tanto por afinidades como por questões institucionais), ajuda a formar uma comunidade musical na qual valores estéticos e técnicos são, de algum modo, desenvolvidos. Isto, por sua vez, além de estimular a criação de uma produção artística desta coletividade também permite o compartilhamento, entre os participantes, de ferramentas teóricas que auxiliam na realização de reflexões sobre esta produção. Em um terceiro momento são apresentados os concertos realizados nesta área (como a série ¿Música?), que exibem parte consistente da produção artística realizada neste contexto e são importantes práticas observáveis desta comunidade. São apresentados também alguns exemplos do repertório nos quais o autor do presente trabalho teve participação direta em sua elaboração. Finalmente, a partir deste contexto, são realizadas discussões sobre possíveis relações entre o músico e seu aparato instrumental. Refletimos que este aparato não se trata apenas de ferramentas passivas, mas de componentes tecnológicos que interagem dialeticamente com o criador e/ou performer, alterando seu modo de pensar as atividades de criação e performance / The specific study objects of this work concern the practices and processes of interactive experimental music creation and performance developed in the last decade in the research environment in sonology at the University of São Paulo (USP). We chose to perform a comprehensive approach of these objects for understanding the socio-cultural context in which occur that creates the conditions for its realization and is somehow reflected in their productions. The beginning of the work is devoted to general contexts where some issues and relevant features of contemporary societies are analyzed, in which, among several other plurals and dynamic processes, expanded the focus of study on the artistic creations, also encompassing the socio-cultural environment in which such productions are developed. Then we observe the specific context of the sonology area at USP, currently represented by the Research Center in Sonology (NuSom), and about how the bond between participants (which can be established both by affinities or per institutional issues), helps form a \'musical community\' in which aesthetic and technical values are somehow developed. This scenario besides stimulating the creation of an artistic production of this collective also enables the sharing, between the participants, of theoretical tools that assist in the realization of reflections on this production. In a third moment are presented the concerts held in this area, which exhibit a consistent part of the artistic production held in this context and are important \"observable practices\" of this community. Some examples of repertoire in which the author of this work had direct participation in their preparation are also presented. In conclusion, from this context, discussions are held about possible relationships between the musician and his instrumental apparatus. We reflect that this apparatus is not just passive tools but technological components that interact dialectically with the creator and/or performer, changing his way of thinking the activities of creation and performance

Segmentation is an indispensable step in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR). Segmentation refers to the splitting of a music piece into significant sections. Classically there has been a great deal of attention focused on various issues of segmentation, such as: perceptual segmentation vs. computational segmentation, segmentation evaluations, segmentation algorithms, etc. In this thesis, we conduct a series of perceptual experiments which challenge several of the traditional assumptions with respect to segmentation. Identifying some deficiencies in the current segmentation evaluation methods, we present a novel standardized evaluation approach which considers segmentation as a supportive step towards feature extraction in the MIR process. Furthermore, we propose a simple but effective segmentation algorithm and evaluate it utilizing our evaluation approach. / viii, 94 leaves : ill. ; 29 cm

My dissertation is an investigation of the rhythm and fills presets on the Mellotron MKII (1964) through a series of compositions. All the sounds used in these compositions are Mellotron sounds from the MKII, which were edited and arranged using a digital audio workstation (DAW). In this study I dissect the instrument, and outline every aspect of the rhythms and fills presets. In the process, I develop an expanded model of performance practice on the instrument, presenting new playing and compositional possibilities. These are made possible through comprehensively documented analysis of the instrument’s sample set and the tempo, key and pitch permutations achievable through its on-board modulation controls. The Mellotron is significant because it was among the first samplers in history, and quickly became an iconic sound, woven into the cultural fabric of 1960s British pop. The Mellotron was used on The Beatles’ ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘Kashmir’, David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, and The Rolling Stones’ ‘2000 Light Years From Home’, to name a few. While the Mellotron is featured on these famous songs, it has never been used as a solo instrument for a long form composition, nor have its samples ever been transcribed. The study takes a reflexive approach, using journals compiled through the composition process to support the development of new Mellotron techniques and compositions. The compositions presented in this study establish and demonstrate the Mellotron’s capability for extended solo work. The new techniques presented here make the Mellotron more practical for improvisation, composition and performance in new musical contexts. Additionally, the research expands scholarly/educational literature on electromechanical keyboards, providing in-depth technical, historical and musical data on the Mellotron. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M. Mus. (Music)

Os objetos de estudo específicos deste trabalho são as práticas e os processos de criação e performance de música experimental interativa desenvolvidos na última década no ambiente de pesquisas em sonologia da Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Optamos por realizar uma abordagem ampla destes objetos por entender que o contexto sociocultural no qual ocorrem cria as condições para sua realização e é, de alguma forma, refletido em suas produções. O início do trabalho é dedicado aos contextos gerais e são analisadas questões e características relevantes das sociedades contemporâneas, nas quais, dentre diversos outros processos dinâmicos e plurais, se ampliou o foco de estudo sobre as criações artísticas, englobando também o ambiente sociocultural no qual tais produções são desenvolvidas. Em seguida, observamos o contexto específico da área de sonologia da USP, representada atualmente pelo Núcleo de Pesquisas em Sonologia (NuSom), e sobre como o vínculo entre os participantes (que pode ser estabelecido tanto por afinidades como por questões institucionais), ajuda a formar uma comunidade musical na qual valores estéticos e técnicos são, de algum modo, desenvolvidos. Isto, por sua vez, além de estimular a criação de uma produção artística desta coletividade também permite o compartilhamento, entre os participantes, de ferramentas teóricas que auxiliam na realização de reflexões sobre esta produção. Em um terceiro momento são apresentados os concertos realizados nesta área (como a série ¿Música?), que exibem parte consistente da produção artística realizada neste contexto e são importantes práticas observáveis desta comunidade. São apresentados também alguns exemplos do repertório nos quais o autor do presente trabalho teve participação direta em sua elaboração. Finalmente, a partir deste contexto, são realizadas discussões sobre possíveis relações entre o músico e seu aparato instrumental. Refletimos que este aparato não se trata apenas de ferramentas passivas, mas de componentes tecnológicos que interagem dialeticamente com o criador e/ou performer, alterando seu modo de pensar as atividades de criação e performance / The specific study objects of this work concern the practices and processes of interactive experimental music creation and performance developed in the last decade in the research environment in sonology at the University of São Paulo (USP). We chose to perform a comprehensive approach of these objects for understanding the socio-cultural context in which occur that creates the conditions for its realization and is somehow reflected in their productions. The beginning of the work is devoted to general contexts where some issues and relevant features of contemporary societies are analyzed, in which, among several other plurals and dynamic processes, expanded the focus of study on the artistic creations, also encompassing the socio-cultural environment in which such productions are developed. Then we observe the specific context of the sonology area at USP, currently represented by the Research Center in Sonology (NuSom), and about how the bond between participants (which can be established both by affinities or per institutional issues), helps form a \'musical community\' in which aesthetic and technical values are somehow developed. This scenario besides stimulating the creation of an artistic production of this collective also enables the sharing, between the participants, of theoretical tools that assist in the realization of reflections on this production. In a third moment are presented the concerts held in this area, which exhibit a consistent part of the artistic production held in this context and are important \"observable practices\" of this community. Some examples of repertoire in which the author of this work had direct participation in their preparation are also presented. In conclusion, from this context, discussions are held about possible relationships between the musician and his instrumental apparatus. We reflect that this apparatus is not just passive tools but technological components that interact dialectically with the creator and/or performer, changing his way of thinking the activities of creation and performance

Bayesian probabilistic modeling provides a powerful framework for building flexible models to incorporate latent structures through likelihood model and prior. When we specify a model, we make certain assumptions about the underlying data-generating process with respect to these latent structures. For example, the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model assumes that when generating a document, we first select a latent topic and then select a word that often appears in the selected topic. We can uncover the latent structures conditioned on the observed data via posterior inference. In this dissertation, we apply the tools of probabilistic latent variable models and try to understand complex real-world data about music semantics and user behavior. We first look into the problem of automatic music tagging -- inferring the semantic tags (e.g., "jazz'', "piano'', "happy'', etc.) from the audio features. We treat music tagging as a matrix completion problem and apply the Poisson matrix factorization model jointly on the vector-quantized audio features and a "bag-of-tags'' representation. This approach exploits the shared latent structure between semantic tags and acoustic codewords. We present experimental results on the Million Song Dataset for both annotation and retrieval tasks, illustrating the steady improvement in performance as more data is used. We then move to the intersection between music semantics and user behavior: music recommendation. The leading performance in music recommendation is achieved by collaborative filtering methods which exploit the similarity patterns in user's listening history. We address the fundamental cold-start problem of collaborative filtering: it cannot recommend new songs that no one has listened to. We train a neural network on semantic tagging information as a content model and use it as a prior in a collaborative filtering model. The proposed system is evaluated on the Million Song Dataset and shows comparably better result than the collaborative filtering approaches, in addition to the favorable performance in the cold-start case. Finally, we focus on general recommender systems. We examine two different types of data: implicit and explicit feedback, and introduce the notion of user exposure (whether or not a user is exposed to an item) as part of the data-generating process, which is latent for implicit data and observed for explicit data. For implicit data, we propose a probabilistic matrix factorization model and infer the user exposure from data. In the language of causal analysis (Imbens and Rubin, 2015), user exposure has close connection to the assignment mechanism. We leverage this connection more directly for explicit data and develop a causal inference approach to recommender systems. We demonstrate that causal inference for recommender systems leads to improved generalization to new data. Exact posterior inference is generally intractable for latent variables models. Throughout this thesis, we will design specific inference procedure to tractably analyze the large-scale data encountered under each scenario.

This dissertation focuses on improving content-based recommendation systems for music. Specifically, progress in the development in music content-based recommendation systems has stalled in recent years due to some faulty assumptions: 1. most acoustic content-based systems for music information retrieval (MIR) assume a bag-of-frames model, where it is assumed that a song contains a simplistic, global audio texture 2. genre, style, mood, and authors are appropriate categories for machine-oriented recommendation 3. similarity is a universal construct and does not vary among different users The main contribution of this dissertation is to address these faulty assumptions by describing a novel approach in MIR that provides user-centric, content-based recommendations based on statistics of acoustic sound elements. First, this dissertation presents the acoustic segment modeling framework that describes a piece of music as a temporal sequence of acoustic segment models (ASMs), which represent individual polyphonic sound elements. A dictionary of ASMs generated in an unsupervised process defines a vocabulary of acoustic tokens that are able to transcribe new musical pieces. Next, standard text-based information retrieval algorithms use statistics of ASM counts to perform various retrieval tasks. Despite a simple feature set compared to other content-based genre recommendation algorithms, the acoustic segment modeling approach is highly competitive on standard genre classification databases. Fundamental to the success of the acoustic segment modeling approach is the ability to model acoustical semantics in a musical piece, which is demonstrated by the detection of musical attributes on temporal characteristics. Further, it is shown that the acoustic segment modeling procedure is able to capture the inherent structure of melody by providing near state-of-the-art performance on an automatic chord recognition task. This dissertation demonstrates that some classification tasks, such as genre, possess information that is not contained in the acoustic signal; therefore, attempts at modeling these categories using only the acoustic content is ill-fated. Further, notions of music similarity are personal in nature and are not derived from a universal ontology. Therefore, this dissertation addresses the second and third limitation of previous content-based retrieval approaches by presenting a user-centric preference rating algorithm. Individual users possess their own cognitive construct of similarity; therefore, retrieval algorithms must demonstrate this flexibility. The proposed rating algorithm is based on the principle of minimum classification error (MCE) training, which has been demonstrated to be robust against outliers and also minimizes the Parzen estimate of the theoretical classification risk. The outlier immunity property limits the effect of labels that arise from non-content-based sources. The MCE-based algorithm performs better than a similar ratings prediction algorithm. Further, this dissertation discusses extensions and future work.

Swarm robotics for music is a relatively new way to explore algorithmic composition as well as new modes of human robot interaction. This work outlines a strategy for making music with a robotic swarm constrained by acoustic sound, rhythmic music using sequencers, motion causing changes in the music, and finally human and swarm interaction. Two novel simulation programs are created in this thesis: the first is a multi-agent simulation designed to explore suitable parameters for motion to music mappings as well as parameters for real time interaction. The second is a boid-based robotic swarm simulation that adheres to the constraints established, using derived parameters from the multi-agent simulation: orientation, number of neighbors, and speed. In addition, five interaction modes are created that vary along an axis of direct and indirect forms of human control over the swarm motion. The mappings and interaction modes of the swarm robot simulation are evaluated in a user study involving music technology students. The purpose of the study is to determine the legibility of the motion to musical mappings and evaluate user preferences for the mappings and modes of interaction in problem solving and in open-ended contexts. The findings suggest that typical users of a swarm robot system do not necessarily prefer more inherently legible mappings in open-ended contexts. Users prefer direct and intermediate modes of interaction in problem solving scenarios, but favor intermediate modes of interaction in open-ended ones. The results from this study will be used in the design and development of a new swarm robotic system for music that can be used in both contexts.

Thesis (M.M.)--East Carolina University, 1998. / Submitted to the faculty of the School of Music. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 13).