Course Catalogue

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This course presents techniques from engineering and computing science which are applicable in the empirical study of musical data (sound, score, structure and performance) with examples from a selection of appropriate musical works presented in different formats. Students will compare how musical information is acquired from different sources, including scores, performances, recordings and music-theoretical texts.

Weekly lectures and five staged tutorial exercises.

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20% Laboratory (haptic data capture and extraction from audio and video recordings),

20% Tutorials (transcription and mark-up exercises),

30% Written

30% Oral (assessment of musical analysis and markup skills) Examination

The aims of this course are to:

• equip candidates with the knowledge and skills to draw out information about musical processes, including those of composition, performance and analysis, from a variety of different sources;

• present the different characters and purposes of diverse representations of music;

• apply modern engineering techniques of measurement to acquire, store and analyse performance data.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ recall the basic terminology required for the analysis of musical data;

■ list common formal musical archetypes;

■ state the classical texts in data acquisition and music processing and summarise their main contributions to the field;

■ transcribe recorded material into score form;

■ employ modern analysis techniques (including note boundary location and pitch determination) to recorded material;

■ identify and classify melodic, harmonic, rhythmic and gestural material rigorously, and in a way commensurate with requirements of computer representation;

■ judge optimal techniques for storage of music data for subsequent analysis (including in SQL databases);

■ represent music in XML, Music-XML and PLM formats, and parse such representations (with, for example Regular Expressions and YACC Grammars);

■ analyse and markup selected musical examples from all periods of the history of Western music;

■ explain the relevance and importance of performance gestures to music;

■ list typical acquisition techniques for gestural capture, including those associated with audio ("indirect") gestural capture and video/haptic ("direct") gestural capture;

■ select appropriate sensors for gestural capture;

■ design appropriate gestural capture systems for subsequent performance analysis;

■ assess the advantages and disadvantages of discrete event file formats (e.g. MIDI, Open Sound Control);

■ evaluate algorithms for the audio and video acquisition of performance parameters.

Students must attend the degree examination and submit at least 75% by weight of the other components of the course's summative assessment.

Students must attend the timetabled laboratory classes.

Note that these are minimum requirements: good students will achieve far higher participation/submission rates.  Any student who misses an assessment or a significant number of classes because of illness or other good cause should report this by completing a MyCampus absence report.