This thesis studies measures of musical rhythm complexity. Informally, rhythm complexity may be thought of as the difficulty humans have performing a rhythm, listening to a rhythm, or recognizing its structure. The problem of understanding rhythm complexity has been studied in musicology and psychology, but there are approaches for its measurement from a variety of domains. This thesis aims to evaluate rhythm complexity measures based on how accurately they reflect human-based measures. Also, it aims to compare their performance using rhythms from Africa, India, and rhythms generated randomly. The results suggest that none of the measures accurately reflect the difficulty humans have performing or listening to rhythm; however, the measures do accurately reflect how humans recognize a rhythm's metrical structure. Additionally, the results suggest a need for normalization of the measures to account for variety among cultural rhythms.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.116081 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Thul, Eric. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (School of Computer Science.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002838221, proquestno: AAIMR67022, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
Page generated in 0.0017 seconds