CIS/COM S/ENGRI/MUSIC/PYSCH 165 and ART 175
  Computing in the Arts
  Spring 2006

Instructors:  Professor Graeme Bailey and Professor Carol Krumhansl

final project session: B21 Lincoln,
1:30-3:00pm,
Tuesday 9th May

if this time doesn't work for some of you, send an email to bailey@cs.cornell.edu

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• Tentative Syllabus
• Class discussions so far ...
  1. basic probabilty and stochastic composition in poetry and music ... experiments, and tuning the probabilities for effect. Homework 1.
  2. Five reasons to look at probabilities:
     • Information theory applied to communication channels (music and language)
     • Entropy as a measure of musical styles
     • Using probabilities to "compose" music Useful approach to studying music cross-culturally
     • Pedagogy -- use probabilities to organize curriculum (most frequent first)
     • Model of learning -- listeners pick up on probabilities in music they hear
     Modified slides from lecture available here.
  3. Presentations of student Markov poems and tunes, discussion of ways of modelling intent, intro to music notation, intervals, and harmonics
  4. Discussion of harmony and cognitive aspects, scales, and ways of manipulating expectations.
  5. Gentle discussion of harmonics for ideal strings and related cognitive aspects. Introduction to the compositional model of Lou Harrison via 'melodicals', 'rhythmicals', and 'interval constraints', plus first thoughts on groups, illustrations with symmetires of planar and solid objects. Homework 2.
  6. More careful discussion of groups
     • with examples: integers mod 12, rotations+reflections in the plane about the origin (non-Abelian), permutations as operations on a set of objects.
     • Group theory has been important for analyzing 12-tone serial music, which uses the transformations transpose (T0, T1, T2, ....T11), inversion (I, which inverts the tone row up to down and vice versa), and retrograde (R, which reverses the order of the tones in the tone row).
  7. Detailed discussion of groups as groups of 'actions' acting on things in a set, leading to thinking of subgroups of actions. Also introduced the ideas of an 'orbit' (the set of things visited when a group element's action is repeated on a particular thing in the set), and an equivalence relation partitioning the set of things into disjoint orbits.
     • examples: integers mod 12 (finiite example with lots of nested orbits),
     • the act of squaring in the plane of complex numbers (behaviour inside, outside and on the unit circle, especially the sets of points on the unit circle with become multiply visited).
     Brief discussion of the perception of symmetry -- slides available here.
  8. Student presentations of homework on music, art and poetry.
  9. More student presentations.
  10. Remarks on time perception -- slides available here.
      • Range 100 ms (discrete events) - 5 sec (psychological present), just noticeable difference 8%
      • Rhythmic behaviors in the range of 600 ms: spontaneous tempo, preferred tempo, subjective equality, synchronization,
      • groups of 2,3,4, groups of groups out to 5 sec
      • Categorical perception to simple ratios, 1:2,
      • Lerdahl & Jackendoff's grouping vs. meter (hierarchies of stress).
      First remarks on creation via rule based systems: introduction to canon and fugue (both rhythmic and melodic), and analogues in art.
  11. More detailed discussion of fugue, exploiting group actions and symmetries.
  12. Link to fugue example (needs free scorch plugin) from class (and in pdf format).
  13. 3-D Sound Cube Demonstration
  14. example Java files on intro material and graphics
  15. example Java file on graphics and midi sound

News etc

Optional Sections

• Monday 27th Feb, 6pm and repeated at 9pm, a gentle introduction to music notation and theory. The 6pm session will be held in Lincoln 124, and the 9pm one in the Music Seminar room (316) on the 3rd floor of Lincoln -- access through the Library on the 2nd floor (it's on the right and up one further floor after entering the Library). Please note that there will be another seminar meeting in 316 until around 9pm, so there's a chance that we might be starting the second session a few minutes later.

Concerts and Events

• 28th Jan, 3pm (free): Concert: Hockett Recital Hall, Whalen Ctr, Ithaca College: violin & piano (Becky Hunter (violin) and Graeme Bailey (piano)): Arvo Part "Fratres", Debussy Sonate, Beethoven Sonata no 10 in G major.
• 28th Jan, 8pm ($6): A link to the Capillary Action band visit to JAM on Saturday night (28th January) mentioned in class on Tuesday, and the associated Cornell Daily Sun article
• 2nd Feb, 8pm (various prices): Alfred Brendel: performing piano music of Mozart and Schubert at the State Theater, downtown.
• 3rd and 4th Feb (free): The organ conference we talked about in Tuesday's class, running Friday and Saturday the 3rd and 4th February on campus.
• 5th March, 3pm (free) Barnes Hall: Peter and the Wolf with the Cornell Chamber Orchestra (narrated by GB).
• 9th-11th March, 8pm, 12th March, 2pm, Schwartz Center: Dance concert 2006.
• 15th-16th March, 8pm, Scwartz Center: Merce Cunnigham Dance Company

Articles and Examples

• A link to the Wolfram music generator mentioned by Rob Ochshorn after Tuesday's class.
• A link to the article on Yoiks referred to in Thursday's class.
• A link to a test page for partially restricted viewing. If you can't see this page, try working from a Cornell IP address. If you can see this from a non-Cornell IP address, would you be kind enough to email Graeme to let him know? Many thanks.
• You mingt find it helpful to have access to a list of words, so I've put a local link to "Kevin's Word List". The index file tells you about the various files available, and you can download any particular file by, for example, replacing "index.html" in the web link by "3esl.txt" (or whichever actual word file you prefer).