A Geometric Model of a Musical Performer’s Ontological Space

Musical performance is above all complex by its ramified ontological richness. We there- fore want to give an ontologically complete picture of music that will enable us to locate performance with respect to all those coordinates known to be determinants of the overall phenomonology of music. This approach will give us the necessary conceptual architecture to unfold a presentation of this paper’s subject, namely the performer’s ontology. We refer to complex time as introduced by Stephen Hawking and Itzhak Bars to describe the space of a performer’s presence.



Music – emotion and the brain

This paper provides an overview of current understanding on music and emotions from the cognitive neuroscience perspective. It is a fact that music has the power to induce and modulate emotional experience. Over past thirty years, there has been increased interest among cognitive neuroscientists to understand the very purpose of music in our lives, the role that it is playing and its neurobiological basis. The associated emotional experience seems to be key reason for ubiquity of music. Musical processing demands a fine level of co-ordination and involvement of several of the brain areas. Better understanding of how our brain processes music is imperative in the light of growing popularity of music as a therapeutic method. There is growing need for evidenced based research and cross-cultural studies. In this paper an attempt has been made to highlight the need for research in neuromusicology in our country using our own music which has certain unique features not observed in other forms of music in the world.


TECHNE: REVEALING SOUND, SPACE AND SELF IN MUSIC FOR FLUTE AND ELECTRONICS

The expansion of electro acoustic music over the last half century has changed the flautist’s sonic and performative environment. New equipment and systems, new technical demands, new synthesis and interpretative strands have evolved, generating new questions and responses to performance. In this setting, the traditional idea of the flautist has transformed into a meta-instrument entity: a collaborative symbiosis of instrumentalist, technologist, hardware, software, virtual and real performance space, and sound. There is a radical shift in performance experience when playing in this multi-dimensional performance zone. This paper traces an historical progression of flute sonority and extended techniques, and the development of electronic spatialisation techniques and their influence on flute performance. These influences include the extended sonic capacities of the flute, new physical responses in the performer, a renewed sense of performance space, the synergy of newly nuanced interconnections and relationships, and a transforming sense of musical identity.


Study of Source Characteristics in Sarod from the Sound Signals

Sarod is one of the most important traditional Indian string musical instruments used for playing classical music. The large number of strings, including drone strings, sympathetic strings and the mode of attachment as well as the peculiar structure of bridge attached to a pliable membrane makes modeling the production mechanism using usual mathematical tools extremely complex. Moreover the system appears to be a non-linear complex one.

Fractal dimensional analysis is an effective tool in understanding the nature of the produced sound in such cases. In the present paper D0 (fractal dimension), D2 (correlation dimension) and also the higher moments are studied for acoustic signals obtained from actual performances. Four ragas performed by eminent sarodists are used. The obeying of the power law indicates the non-linearity. The presence of multi-fractality is noticed.

A note on the problem of finding similarity between Melodies of Unequal Length

The problem of finding similarity between melodies of unequal length has been taken up here. If two melodies are of length w and s where w < s (say), our suggestion is to take all possible segments of length w from the longer melody (which is of length s) and then compare each segment with the shorter melody of length w using correlation coefficient of their shapes. If at least one such comparison reveals similarity, the two melodies would be regarded as similar with degree (w/s) x100%. An example is supplied in a raga.


AFFINE MUSICAL TRANSFORMATIONS USING MULTI-TOUCH GESTURES

We propose an elegant extension of the common vocabulary of multi-touch gestures so that they can be applied to define general affine transformations in a two-dimensional space. This new set of simple gestures is currently being implemented in a new version of the Big Bang Rubette, a gestural music composition module for the Rubato Composer music software.

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