On Thu, 15 Apr 2004, Ian Smith-Heisters wrote:
I'm not familiar with Markov-chain modeling, but it might be an interesting endeavor to try to describe genres of music using first order logic ;).
First-order logic is nice, but I wouldn't try to make hard classifications, so I wouldn't use truth values as distinctions between styles, but rather create continuous metrics, possibly involving vectorspaces. Of course this can be fitted inside a first-order predicate logic context, as almost everything can... but pure logic of black/white binary oppositions seem limitative to me, so in my system truth-values wouldn't play a very central role.
A lot of people say that music is a mathemetical language so a more mathematical approach may tend to be more efficient.
More mathematical than what? Markov chains/tables are mathematical, but you seem to realise that too, so I'm not sure what you mean by more mathematical...
Once you've defined your language of notes, measures, tempos etc (a much smaller vocabulary than traditional natural language)
That is debatable. In NLP and programming-language parsing, it can be considered that there is a language in which the vocabulary is just letters and characters, and that this language is used to construct a higher-level language in which the vocabulary is made of words, and so on.
This modularisation/factorisation of a language is very much useful, and it can be seen in how compilers are usually constructed. Using Chomsky's taxonomy, a programming language is usually a contextful (type 0 or 1) language, but it is factored in a contextfree part, handled by lex/yacc parser-generators or similar, and a contextful part, parsed more explicitly. The context-free part (type 2) is in turn factored into a regular part (type 3) handled by Lex and a irregular part handled by Yacc.
How this is relevant here is that, in a factored language definition, at the level 3 the vocabulary is letters, at the level 2 the vocabulary is tokens (usually words), and at the level 1 the vocabulary is phrases/sentences/statements/... And that a musical language can be factored in the same way, or in any way felt to be appropriate. Notes may be at the base level, and scales may be higher-level, and themes may be higher-level even, and so on.
you could let the modeling search go at it. Or something. I only have a cursory understanding of AI,
so do I...
I'm just musing at this point.
so do I again =)
It takes a signal input and outputs the song's genre and aesthetic quality on a scale of 1-10.
Actually, even though I think many æsthetical judgements can be formalized, not all can, and even, who gets to decide the æsthetical rules? They tend to be very contextual and ever-changing; well, unless the Academy or the Church emits strict rules, but we're not in that era anymore =) There is a multitude of possible æsthetical models and in the end it all depends on which crowd you are trying to please -- even within _one_ so-called genre...!
Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju