Introduction to Music Informatics Donald Byrd Rev 1
Introduction to Music Informatics Donald Byrd Rev. 1 Sept. 2006 Copyright © 2006, Donald Byrd 1
Welcome • This is a very exciting time for music! • Music informatics is hard to teach – Music and technology are both changing quickly – Few students have much background in both – Solution: compromise • Spend some time bringing each “up to speed” • Reduce technical demands in both areas • What is music informatics? – Similar to music information technology 2
Class Procedures • Communication – – Web site E-mail Announcements in class On. Course: not for now • Grading – Project & presentations are most important – Participation is important – Importance/frequency of quizzes is TBD • Goal: avoid “death by Power. Point” 3
1. Our Own Music • Student music background: 2 grad degree, 4 undergrad degree, 4 no degree (wide variety) • Assignment: compose simple melodies with Impromptu – Bamberger paper • Experiment with Impromptu shows dev. of intuitive musical understanding • Claim: musically untrained people can still create music following cultural archetypes – Purpose for us? 4
1. Our Own Music • Different approaches to research – Highly controlled environments • More objective, easier to quantify results – Less controlled • Better for exploration – Sim. to “naturalists 1 st, scientists later” idea – Music isn’t a science! But… – What music “scholars” do similar to what “scientists” (esp. social scientists) do 5
1. Our Own Music • Different approaches to research – What “scholars” do similar to what “scientists” (esp. social scientists) do – Good reason: music is subtle, but not magic! • David Huron: Explanatory Goals of Music Analysis – Learned as a music student: “methodology is fetish; rigour is a form of self-deception” – …as a music scholar: methodology is “simply a way of internalizing the lessons learned from past scholarly mistakes” 6
1. Our Own Music • Bring in “Music We’re Interested In” – Soon (next week) 7
1. Programming in R: No Problem! • • R is very interactive: can use as powerful calculator Assignments will be simple Much help available: from Don & other students Why R? – NOT because it's great for statistics! – easy to do simple things with it, including graphs and handling audio files • probably not good for complex programs – free, and available for all popular operating systems – very interactive => easy to experiment – has good documentation – Chris Raphael is using it, and he thinks it's good for music informatics – Chris Raphael is using it, and standardizing is a good thing 8
1. Rudiments of R • Originally for statistics; good for far more • How to get R – Web site: http: //cran. us. r-project. org/ – Versions for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows • Tutorial: • http: //xavier. informatics. indiana. edu/~craphael/teach/symb olic_music/ • R as a powerful graphing, musicing, etc. calculator 9
1. Rudiments of Musical Acoustics • Need some musical acoustics for almost anything in digital audio • Need some now (use with R), more later • Acoustics: part of physics – Concepts like frequency & amplitude • Psychoacoustics: part of psychology – Concepts like pitch & loudness 10
- Slides: 10