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Department of Computer Science and Technology

Digital Signal Processing with Computer Music

Course pages 2021–22

Digital Signal Processing with Computer Music

Moodle Link

Note that we do not expect to place any of the course content in Moodle. This link will be used for submission of assignment work, and for registered students to access the Zoom link for seminars. Moodle course: Digital Signal Processing with Computer Music 2021-22

Overview

The structure of this course involves an overview of the main areas of investigation in Computer Music, supported by lectures on each of those specialist topics, together with a 'deep dive' into one or two topics chosen according to your own interests. The lectures are intended to be accessible to students with a good undergraduate understanding of computer science and signal processing, and some knowledge of basic musical concepts. For each topic, the lecturer has suggested either a research review article giving an overview of that specialist area, or a few examples of recent research, to give a flavour of the style of investigation and findings that result.

In the 'deep dive' exercises, students will need to become more familiar with at least one of these specialist areas. This will involve reading beyond the suggested readings, following citations to specific pieces of work that are relevant to a research question of interest to the student. These investigations must be based on publications in peer-reviewed research literature, rather than popular books, magazine articles or other online resources.

It will also be beneficial to browse the recent conference proceedings from specialist research venues listed below, and/or follow citations from Nick Collins' textbook. Once a specific topic has been identified, it will be helpful to learn more about related work by senior figures by consulting their personal web pages or Google Scholar profiles.

Target papers for review assignments

Lecturers contributing to the course will be making suggestions of relevant recent research publications. These can be used as target papers for your review assignment. Some of the publications listed below are themselves review papers, providing overviews of research on that topic. In these cases, you should select from the bibliography in the review paper to select a single target paper for your own review.

Individual lectures

Thursday 4 November: Prof. Mark Gotham, University of Dortmund:
Introductory session on ‘Music and/as data' [Slides (PDF)]

Tuesday 9 November: Prof. Alan Blackwell:
Audio display and interaction [Slides (PDF)]

Thursday 11 November: Dr Gianluca Micchi:
Automatic Harmonic Analysis / Computational Harmony [Slides (PDF)]

Tuesday 16 November: Dr Christophe Rhodes, Google:
Audio Synthesis [Slides (PDF)]

Thursday 18 November: Prof. Alan Blackwell:
Software Architectures for Coding Music [Slides (PDF)]

Tuesday 23 November: Dr Neta Spiro, Royal College of Music:
The Psychology of Music [Slides (PDF)]

Thursday 25 November: Dr Zubin Kanga, Royal Holloway, University of London:
Hardware for electronic enhancement of acoustic instruments [Slides (PDF)], and videos:

Tuesday 30 November: Prof. Georgina Born, University College London:
Diversifying Computer Music: Knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures [Slides (PDF)] and [full paper]

Tuesday 30 November: Final performance session

Lecture slides

Copies of the lecture slides have been made available by kind permission of the guest lecturers. All slides have copyright retained by the lecturer (2021). Please do not copy or distribute without permission.

Suggested Reading

Mark Gotham

Müller, M.: Fundamentals of Music Processing, Springer, 2021 (2nd ed.). For accompanying python notebook for exploration and exercises, start here: https://www.audiolabs-erlangen.de/fau/professor/mueller/bookFMP
Gotham, M., and Ireland, M. Taking form: A representation standard, conversion code, and example corpora for recording, visualizing, and studying analyses of musical form. In Proceedings of the 20th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2019, Delft, The Netherlands, November 4-8, 2019 (2019), A. Flexer, G. Peeters, J. Urbano, and A. Volk, Eds., pp. 693–699. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3527904
John Ashley Burgoyne, Jonathan Wild, and Ichiro Fujinaga, ‘An Expert Ground Truth Set for Audio Chord Recognition and Music Analysis’, in Proceedings of the 12th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ed. Anssi Klapuri and Colby Leider (Miami, FL, 2011), pp. 633–38 https://ismir2011.ismir.net/papers/OS8-1.pdf

Alan Blackwell

Csapó, Ádám, and György Wersényi. "Overview of auditory representations in human-machine interfaces." ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR) 46, no. 2 (2013): 19. (review paper)
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2543586
Steven Brewster. "Using nonspeech sounds to provide navigation cues." ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 5 (3), 224-259.
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=292834.292839
R. D. Patterson (1990). Auditory Warning Sounds in the Work Environment. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 327, No. 1241, Human Factors in Hazardous Situations (Apr. 12, 1990), pp. 485-492
https://www.jstor.org/stable/55320
Grond, Florian, and Thomas Hermann. "Interactive Sonification for Data Exploration: How listening modes and display purposes define design guidelines." Organised Sound 19, no. 1 (2014): 41-51.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771813000393

Gianluca Micchi

Micchi, G., Gotham, M. and Giraud, M., 2020. Not All Roads Lead to Rome: Pitch Representation and Model Architecture for Automatic Harmonic Analysis. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 3(1), pp.42–54. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.45
Chen, T.-P. and Su, L., 2021. Attend to Chords: Improving Harmonic Analysis of Symbolic Music Using Transformer-Based Models. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 4(1), pp.1–13. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.65

Neta Spiro

Grahn, Jessica A., and Dirk Schuit. 2012. “Individual Differences in Rhythmic Ability: Behavioral and Neuroimaging Investigations.” Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, Neurosciences and Music, 22 (2): 105–21. (review paper)
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031188 (Cambridge institutional subscription - contact me for a PDF if this doesn't work)

Zubin Kanga

Kanga, Z., 2020. Wiki-Piano: Examining the Crowd-Sourced Composition of a Continuously Changing Internet-Based Score. Tempo, 74(294), pp.6-22.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0040298220000352
Kanga, Z., 2016. Gesture-technology interactions in contemporary music, Contemporary Music Review, 35:4-5, 375-378
https://doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1258104
Kanga, Z. (2016). “Building an instrument” in the collaborative composition and performance of works for piano and live electronics. In Perspectives on Artistic Research, ed. Robert Burke and Andrys Onsman (London: Lexington, 2016)

Christophe Rhodes

Ó Nuanáin, C., Herrera, P. and Jordà, S. (2017). Rhythmic Concatenative Synthesis for Electronic Music: Techniques, Implementation, and Evaluation. Computer Music Journal 41:2 pp.21-37.(review paper)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/662532/pdf
Bank, B. and Chabassier, J. (2019). Model-Based Digital Pianos. IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 36:1 pp.103-114
https://doi.org/10.1109/MSP.2018.2872349

Sam Aaron

Aaron, S. and Blackwell, A.F. (2013). From Sonic Pi to Overtone: Creative musical experiences with domain-specific and functional languages. Proceedings of the first ACM SIGPLAN workshop on Functional art, music, modeling & design, pp. 35-46.
https://doi.org/10.1145/2505341.2505346
Aaron, S., Orchard, D. and Blackwell, A.F. (2014). Temporal semantics for a live coding language. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN international workshop on Functional art, music, modeling & design (FARM '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 37-47.
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2633638.2633648

Georgina Born

Born, G., 2020. Diversifying MIR: Knowledge and Real-World Challenges, and New Interdisciplinary Futures. Transactions of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, 3(1), pp.193–204.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/tismir.58

Research venues

International Computer Music Association http://www.computermusic.org/

New Interfaces for Musical Expression http://www.nime.org/

International Society of Music Information Retrieval http://ismir.net/conferences/

International Conference on Live Coding https://iclc.toplap.org/

International Conference on Auditory Displays https://icad.org/

International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation http://tenor-conference.org/

International Workshop on Musical Metacreation http://musicalmetacreation.org/

Background reading

A good overview of the main topics covered in this course is provided by Nick Collins' Introduction to Computer Music (Wiley 2009).

A nice how-to guide to sound synthesis, with practical examples of many specific sound classes in the Pd language, is Designing Sound by Andy Farnell (MIT Press 2010)

To build on the DSP part of the course, and understand how the mathematical description of sound can be used to characterise all the phenomena covered in the second part of the course, an excellent and comprehensive reference is Human and Machine Hearing: Extracting Meaning from Sound, by Richard Lyon (Cambridge University Press 2017)

Several lecturers have recommended articles in the January 2019 issue of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on "Recent Advances in Music Signal Processing". The whole of this issue is worth browsing.

Georgina Born wrote a classic anthropological study of the social context in which Computer Music research is carried out: Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (University of California Press 1995)

The Music21 Library used by Mark Gotham is described here:
Cuthbert, M. S. & Ariza, C. (2010). Music21: A toolkit for computer-aided musicology and symbolic music data. In Proceedings of the 11th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2010, Utrecht, Netherlands, August 9-13, 2010, 637–642.
And a set of further resources can be found here:
https://github.com/MarkGotham/MusoRepo

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