I'm not sure what you mean by more mathematical...
More mathematical than describing music in first-order logic. I admit that such a thing would be impractical, as you point out. But it could offer an interesting excercise--perhaps in futility, but interesting nonetheless.
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...!
I'm afraid my humor may have been lost somewhere in its translation to the bitstream. I am the first to agree that aesthetics are not only difficult to formalize and judge, but also that aesthetics are very often not the primary interest of art. Doing all that in realtime through PD is not only technically impossible, but undesired.
However, I found out more about the method of compression to find similarities in music that I mentioned in my first email. The practice originated in analyzing DNA. A Markov chain analysis essentially is looking for similarities in the probability functions between states in (in this case) a piece of music. Instead, you can compress the music using any old compression scheme (there has been quite a bit of research into which ones work best for what). Then you compare the compressed music to another piece of compressed music. Since the compression is looking for similarities, just like Markov Chain modeling does, the difference in the two filesizes is directly porportional to the amount of difference in the two songs. The advantage (I guess) is that there is much less specialization required in writing the analysis functions. In twenty words or less.
But, as gml@xs4all.nl points out:
Actually that looks more like a audio/video track database description/querying method. The question was more about how to get analysis information from an audio stream.
we've gotten off topic. On my part this digression sprouted from wondering what to do with all the waveform analysis data once you have it.
gml@xs4all.nl:
Besides the analytical tools with orthonormal function-spaces (fourier etc.) I am also looking into classification based on the geometric/topological properties of the wave. Things like the fractal dimension of the waveform over either a short window, like fft's, or on longer segments. They use this kind of stuff to analyse heart-rythms f.i.
I would be interested in any links you might have, as I'm unfamiliar with this kind of analysis.
Cheers, Ian
On Saturday 17 April 2004 03:22, Ian Smith-Heisters wrote:
just like Markov Chain modeling does, the difference in the two filesizes is directly porportional to the amount of difference in the two songs. The advantage (I guess) is that there is much less specialization required in writing the analysis functions. In twenty words or less.
I read about something like that, but they were analysing mididatafiles compressed with zip. So there was allready a high level of information there. The pitches and all. I wonder if it works for a compressed WAV file.
we've gotten off topic. On my part this digression sprouted from wondering what to do with all the waveform analysis data once you have it.
That is the big question of course. Raw analysis data is too much anyway, you need to reduce it somehow and then what....?
You could use it generate a midi-like stream of notes and compare that to something. And then use the amount of similarity to do something else. Or you could try to generate sound that is as different as possible.
What those somethings are is were the creativity of the composer comes in. Because IMHO programming a patch that makes music using this, is composing as much as putting notes on score paper or sounds on CD.
gml@xs4all.nl:
Besides the analytical tools with orthonormal function-spaces (fourier etc.) I am also looking into classification based on the geometric/topological properties of the wave. Things like the fractal dimension of the waveform over either a short window, like fft's, or on longer segments. They use this kind of stuff to analyse heart-rythms f.i.
I would be interested in any links you might have, as I'm unfamiliar with this kind of analysis.
I looked into this before Christmas and then was to busy to follow up on it. It hasn't been used in musical analysis that I know of. But if you google for "fractal dimension" and "periodic signal" you get a lof links. I am still not sure if it _is_ useful at all, but I got some pretty strange results that I liked and I will continue trying this out.
Gerard
On Fri, 16 Apr 2004, Ian Smith-Heisters wrote:
I'm afraid my humor may have been lost somewhere in its translation to the bitstream. I am the first to agree that aesthetics are not only difficult to formalize and judge, but also that aesthetics are very often not the primary interest of art.
Well, I think even when the whole concept of æsthetic gets considered cheesy (maybe because connoted by former, cheesy conceptions of æsthetics), then there is a covert system of æsthetics called by other names. A piece can be judged by the æsthetics of the concept itself, or the æsthetics of the social relevance, and so on (many criteria), but usually not using the æsthetic and especially not the b-word ("beauty").
Art is in denial.
Doing all that in realtime through PD is not only technically impossible, but undesired.
Makes me think that maybe it gets more complicated than « covert æsthetics » nowadays. It may even be « covert judgement ». That's the wave of politically correct, touchyfeely, « i'm ok, you're ok », where people refrain from judgement, I mean refrain from admitting to it, and still do it inside of themselves because they can't help it.
Instead, you can compress the music using any old compression scheme (there has been quite a bit of research into which ones work best for what). Then you compare the compressed music to another piece of compressed music. Since the compression is looking for similarities, just like Markov Chain modeling does, the difference in the two filesizes is directly porportional to the amount of difference in the two songs.
No it's certainly not, because old compression schemes do not look at the whole file all of the time; they are highly local, as a way to save effort. E.g. maybe with Lempel-Ziv you'd use a 4k or 32k or 256k window. With dynamic Huffman, there is a lot of locality as well, as the coding system morphs quite gradually from one thing to the other depending on what kind of data has been seen lately.
Actually that looks more like a audio/video track database description/querying method. The question was more about how to get analysis information from an audio stream.
we've gotten off topic. On my part this digression sprouted from wondering what to do with all the waveform analysis data once you have it.
I'm not sure how discussing of a high-level musical description for a database differs from a high-level musical description for a stream. Actually I thought that to actually put such a thing in a db you'd actually first analyse a stream. So I'm really puzzled, as to what is the distinction that is being made here, and why.
Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju
Mathiue wrote
I'm not sure how discussing of a high-level musical description for a database differs from a high-level musical description for a stream. Actually I thought that to actually put such a thing in a db you'd actually first analyse a stream. So I'm really puzzled, as to what is the distinction that is being made here, and why.
If you look at the site, you will see that the db they describe is for things like track-name/record-label/artist. So it is mostly perhaps an economic database. It is not geared to key/row/instrumentation kind of info, let alone formal structure like sonata or whatever.
Gerard
On Sat, 17 Apr 2004, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
Well, I think even when the whole concept of æsthetic gets considered cheesy (maybe because connoted by former, cheesy conceptions of æsthetics), then there is a covert system of æsthetics called by other names. A piece can be judged by the æsthetics of the concept itself, or the æsthetics of the social relevance, and so on (many criteria), but usually not using the æsthetic and especially not the b-word ("beauty").
Gaah, I hate it when I skip a word (or a handful). Last sentence should read:
« A piece can be judged by the æsthetics of the concept itself, or the æsthetics of the social relevance, and so on (many criteria), but usually not using the traditional notions of visual/auditive æsthetics and especially not the b-word ("beauty"). »
so if it made no sense to you, that's ok, as it made no sense to me either. SNAFU. sorry for the inconvenience.
Mathieu Bouchard http://artengine.ca/matju
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gml＠xs4all.nl -
Ian Smith-Heisters -
Mathieu Bouchard -
vanDongen/Gilcher