PhD Studentships - Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
The Open University has fully funded full-time PhD studentships available from Oct 2013. One possible topic is as follows.
I am interested in hearing from candidates to study Interfaces for Interacting with Musical Patterns, particularly as discussed in the skeleton proposal outlined below.
Please contact me, Dr Robin Laney (r.c.laney @ open.ac.uk), for an informal discussion and advice on constructing a proposal.
Applications should comprise an application form, a CV and a PhD proposal. Application forms and general advice on PhD proposals can be found at:
http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/research-degrees/explained/how_to_apply/mphil_and_phd_applications.htm
Closing date: March 31st 2013.
Interacting with Musical Patterns
Background
There is a long history of musicological research [1] aimed at explaining how music creates meaning for a listener. We now have powerful software and hardware that can be used to manipulate music in many ways. It is interesting to consider how technological applications are informed by the musicological debate and whether technology can help the elusive search for the meaning of music.
One of the key ways that music seems to generate interest in a listener is through the repetition and transformation of musical patterns – including for example motifs in classical music, and riffs in Jazz and Pop.
Recent empirical work in the Computing department has identified key metrics for predicting the perceived saliency of a given musical pattern [2]. We have also extended some existing algorithms that extract patterns from a symbolic representation of music to take into account what is known as the problem of isolated membership [3]. Isolated membership refers to an instance where mathematically a note could belong to a pattern but musically it seems to make less sense."
This PhD project would combine the dept’s expertise in musical pattern discovery with our work that uses touchable surfaces to generate and manipulate music [4,5].
Goals
The key goals would be:
1) To find good graphical and/or tangible representations of musical patterns. This might mean representations such that the visual appearance reflects the degree of musical salience, but other criteria such as support for reasoning might apply.
2) To find powerful ways for users to manipulate patterns in ways that have musical significance.
3) To use a system based on these findings to explore further the cognitive aspects of why particular patterns have significance.
4) To explore using a pattern manipulation system as a way of composing music or creating variations on existing pieces.
By developing a touchable surface approach to reasoning about and manipulating music, there is also the possibility of opening up the kind of analysis currently done by experts working alone, to small groups of less specialist users working collaboratively to share ideas and knowledge.
References
[1] Meyer, Leonard B. (1956). Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
[2] Collins, Tom; Laney, Robin; Willis, Alistair and Garthwaite, Paul (2011). Modeling pattern importance in Chopin's mazurkas. Music Perception, 28(4), pp. 387–414.
[3] Collins, Tom; Thurlow, Jeremy; Laney, Robin; Willis, Alistair and Garthwaite, Paul (2010). A comparative evaluation of algorithms for discovering translational patterns in Baroque keyboard works. In: Proceedings of the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval, 9-13 Aug 2010, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
[4] Laney, Robin; Dobbyn, Chris; Xambó, Anna; Schirosa, Mattia; Miell, Dorothy; Littleton, Karen and Dalton, Nick (2010). Issues and techniques for collaborative music making on multi-touch surfaces. In: 7th Sound and Music Computing Conference, 21-24 July 2010, Barcelona.
[5] Xambó, Anna; Laney, Robin; Dobbyn, Chris and Jordà, Sergi (2011). Multi-touch interaction principles for collaborative real-time music activities: towards a pattern language. In: International Computer Music Conference Proceedings, 31 July - 5 August 2011, Huddersfield.
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