Graduate Seminar in Electro-Acoustic Music
Dartmouth College
Winter, 2005
Systems of Musical Thought
Polansky
1/7/05
class wiki
(discussion of readings)
This class will focus on student research and compositional projects, each exploring a different, current topic in formal descriptions, theories, explications, and speculations of musical thought and practice. We will focus on general theoretical ideas which are or might be used to describe and/or create music, and which lend themselves to computer music implementations.
Each student will be assigned to lead the discussion on one of the topics, focusing on the readings, asking specific questions, and essentially, leading the seminar as the instructor. The intent of this is to offer some practical teaching experience in this context, as well as to try and get everyone involved in the subject matter as deeply as possible. For each topic, that student will be asked to prepare a kind of "take-home" set of questions about the readings and the topic, which all the other students will complete.
In addition to the readings, students will do three software-based research and composition projects, accompanied by written documentation of the theoretical ideas explored, relating to the selected topics.
(by topic)
Class meets Tuesday and Thursday, 10-12.
First class: Tuesday, Jan. 11. Please read the first set of articles by that day ("species counterpoint").
Note: Although we will cover the topics below in this order, the actual day-to-day schedule is TBA. We will have guests, student presentations, spend more time on certain topics than others, and so on. This web-site will be kept up-to-date in terms of specific assignment due-dates, in-class presentations, and so on, as the course progresses.
Dunn, David, "Cybernetics, Sound Art and the Sacred", 2004.
Rahn, John, "Aspects of Musical Explanation", Perspectives of New Music, 1979
Selected
Readings from The
Origins of Music, edited by
Wallin, Merker
and Brown (in reader and Reserve Book)
Goldstone, Similarity, MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences, 2001
Deliege, "Grouping Conditions in Listening to Music: An Approach to L&J's Grouping Preference Rules", Music Perception, 1987.
Dowling, "Scale and Contour: Two Components of a Theory of Memory for Melodies", Psychological Review, 1978
Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Chapters 1-3, 1983. (Reserve Book)Polansky
and
Bassein, Possible and Impossible Melody: Some Formal Aspects of
Contour, Journal
of Music Theory, 1992.
Rock and Palmer, "The Legacy of Gestalt Pyschology", Scientific American, 1990.
Tenney and Polansky, "Temporal Gestalt Perception in Music", Journal of Music Theory, 1980.
Tenney, Meta + Hodos and META Meta + Hodos,1961/86 (Reserve Book)
Wyse,
"Contour
Hierarchies, Tied Parameters, Sound Models and Music", ICMC
Proceedings, 2004.
Doty, David, The Just Intonation Primer, 1993 (Reserve Book)
Partch, Harry, Genesis of a Music, 1974, Da Capo Press (Reserve Book), esp. chapters 2-10.
Polansky, "Harmony Primer", 2001, notes.
Polansky, "Notes on Optimal
Well-Temperament", in
progress, 2004.
Shepard, "Structural Representations of Musical Pitch", in The Psychology of Music (Deutsch), 1982
Tenney,
"The
Several Dimensions of Pitch", in The Ratio Book, (Barlow), 2001
Binongo, Who Wrote the 15th Book of Oz? An Application of Multivariate Analysis to Authorship Attribution, Chance, 2003
Dubnov and Apel, "Audio Segmentation by Singular Value Clustering", ICMC Proceedings, 2004
Dubnov,
Lartillot,
and Bejerano, Using
Machine-Learning Methods for Musical Style
Modeling, Computer, 2004
McKay,
"Automatic
Genre Classification as a Study of the Viability of High-Level Features
for
Music Classification", ICMC Proceedings,
2004.
Nosofsky,
"Stimulus Bias, Asymmetric Similarity, and Classification", Cognitive
Psychology, 1991.
Temperley,
The
Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, 2001
(Reserve Book), selected chapters
Bentley
and
Corne, Creative Evolutionary Systems,
Morgan Kauffman, 2002, (Reserve Book), selected chapters.
Beyls, "Cellular Automata Mapping Procedures", ICMC Proceedings, 2004.
Students are asked to do four things in this seminar:
For each assignment, the composition or research project must clearly relate to or implement, in a formal, articulate-able way, something suggested by or described in the readings or in class discussions. I am not interested in intuitive, poetic interpretations of these ideas so much as attempts to really try out specific concepts in either a musical (piece) or heuristic (software) way. Whether software or piece, each assignment must also have a written component describing in detail:
In designing these projects, I would like students
to
seriously consider the question of what is a "test" of
one of these ideas? How
does the software or piece really teach us something new about the
import,
validity, generality, possibility or artistic potential of the formal
idea? In
particular, how can we judge the result? While a wide variety of
answers and
interpretations are possible to the above questions, I am most
interested in
those that treat explicability without resort to ambiguity as seriously
as
possible.