MA, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, 2012 / This research-report presents a theoretical exploration of musical encoding which has its basis in general semiotic theory. By examining what this reveals about the problematic and mysterious issue of music’s meaning, I argue that the most visceral and direct form of it is found in the manner in which the composer shapes a certain kind of temporal experience (erlebnis) which is engendered by the music itself. This reveals that sensations of goal-directed movement, closure, tension and release are shaped in a phenomenological way against a background of continuity that is established by metrical cyclicity and phrasal periodisation. As a result, the interpretation of certain kinds of accumulative structural effects generated by the gestural (rhythmic and melodic/harmonic) inflections of the temporal and intonational planes become meaningful in a rhetorical, affective (affekten) and topical sense. A study of Ngqoko (Xhosa) overtone-music, as a case study into African indigenous music (as opposed to the examples cited of Western art music), shows that an intensification of the relationships between pitch and rhythm that exist in speech-tone results in the formation of melody and a culturally embedded vocabulary of intonations. I argue that this resultant edifice exists in the music of most cultures and that this ultimately serves as the basis of musical encoding. Therefore musical meaning develops in ways that are completely intrinsic to music.

This work deals with the possibility of a fast football match analysis from audio part of record with the possibility of implementation of some methods for other than football matches as well. The first intention was concentrated on detection of whiz of the soccer whistle that has specific frequency in its specter, which is out of common speech frequency. After detection harmonic frequency , the attention was focused on the definition of whiz meaning. Referee was helpful with the issue as he informed me about the number of whiz styles and provided me with referential samples for whiz classification. Neural network with back propagation was used for definition of whiz meaning. Another subject for detection of important moments of the match was concentration on the commentator’s basic tone. In case the commentator is really excited with the match, his basic speech tone automatically intensifies with every important action of the game. Analysis of commentator’s intensified basic speech tone was realized in this work too. Also the national hymns of teams playing against each other are a significant moment of the match. That is why detection of a hymn became another subject of analysis. Advantages of MFCC were used to obtain audio signal feature, from which 20 coefficients were gained. These were used as an entrance for classifier based on neural network with back propagation. For easy usage of these methods a graphic user interface with possibility of well-arranged look on gained results and also with possibility of replaying chosen section was created.