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MESSAGE FOLLOWS:
A reminder that tomorrow, 19 October at 4:00pm, Elaine Chew will present
the seminar 'Musical Trajectories: Humour, Structure, and Interpretation'.
The talk will take place in room 209 in the Electronic Engineering
building, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS.
Directions on how to access the building can be found at
http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/about/campus-map.php. If you experience
problems entering, the lab phone number is +44 (0)20 7882 5343 and if I am
not available, anyone else in the lab should be able to help. If you are
coming from outside Queen Mary, please let me know, so I can make sure
no-one is stuck outside the doors. Details of future seminars can be found
at http://www.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/newsevents/researchgroupevents.php?i=12.
All are welcome to attend. For those unable to do so, a video recording of
the seminar will be available online after a few days.
If you wish to be added to / removed from our mailing list, please send me
an email and I'll be happy to do so.
Wednesday's seminar (19 October, 4:00pm):
Title:
Musical Trajectories: Humour, Structure, and Interpretation
Speaker:
Elaine Chew
Abstract:
A firm understanding of music structure and mastery of musical prosody are
key components of a performing musician's toolkit. This talk is centred on
methods and metaphors in visualisations of music structure and expressive
performance as aids to illuminating what it is that musicians do. The
presentation begins with some work on representation of tonality and
algorithms for tonal analysis using Chew's spiral array model, and their
application through an interactive software system, MuSA.RT, to
visualisation of music structure, in particular, violations of tonal
expectations, as employed by PDQ Bach as a laughter-inducing device. The
second part of the talk focuses on performance, and begins with an
introduction to the ESP driving metaphor for expressive performance,
describing how the roads map to musical interpretations. Some limitations
of this intuitive interface led to ensuing work on more detailed analyses
of expressive nuances, to be illustrated through selected student
projects. The talk concludes with an analysis that connects interpretation
to music structure, and is based on a study on tempo variations in
performances of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata by Barenboim, Pollini, and
Schnabel.
MuSA.RT was developed in collaboration with Alexandre François, using his
software architecture for interactive software systems, and ESP with Jie
Liu and Alexandre François. The Beethoven analysis was inspired by a
lecture by Jeanne Bamberger. Thanks are owed to Dan Tidhar, whose
invitation to a music visualisation workshop at King's College London
helped shape the content of this presentation.
Bio:
Elaine Chew is Professor of Digital Media at the Centre for Digital Music
at Queen Mary, University of London. An operations researcher and pianist
by training, her research activities aim to explain and de-mystify the
phenomenon of music and its performance through the use of formal
scientific methods. As a performer, she designs and curates concerts
featuring interactive scientific music visualisations, and collaborates
with composers to present eclectic post-tonal music. Prof. Chew received
her PhD and SM degrees in operations research from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, a BAS in music (distinction) and mathematical and
computational sciences (honors) from Stanford University, and FTCL and
LTCL diplomas in piano performance from Trinity College, London. She began
her academic career at the University of Southern California, where she
was awarded various NSF grants and the Presidential Early Career Award in
Science and Engineering for research and education activities at the
intersection of music and engineering. She was the 2007-2008 Edward,
Frances, and Shirley B. Daniels Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2009, Albany Records released a
CD, Doubles, featuring her performance of English-American composer Peter
Child's bitonal pieces based on Chinese and Malay songs from her
childhood.
C4DM Website : http://www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/digitalmusic/index.html
--
Peter Foster
Postgraduate Research Student
Room 103, Electronic Engineering Bldg
Centre for Digital Music
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK
email: [log in to unmask]
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