Music, Music Representation, and Music Retrieval

Music is an art; a performing art; and a fundamentally nonrepresentational performing art. Each of these characteristics has a profound effect on how musical information can be represented and therefore on how it can be retrieved. As an art, numerous works in a given medium use the same elements, but artists creating new works use them in novel ways almost constantly. In general, a performance of a musical work is not the work itself. Any performance is simply an instantiation in sound of the work, one of a myriad of possible instantiations. The work itself can be described by music notation in what is called a score. Finally, being nonrepresentational means that everything is abstract: music need not be, and usually is not, focused on objects from the real world.

This talk will also briefly discuss retrieval of music from common representations, including both audio and the remarkable edifice of Conventional Western Music Notation (CWMN). The talk will show examples of notation produced by an experimental version of the Nightingale music-score editor, notation that for the first time enables CWMN to represent precisely what happens during a note.

Speaker(s): Don Byrd,

Room: Room 105, Bldg: Computer Science Building, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, United States, 08544, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/345495