Re: Forming sequential objects (Steve Mcadams )


Subject: Re: Forming sequential objects
From:    Steve Mcadams  <Steve.McAdams(at)IRCAM.FR>
Date:    Wed, 15 Sep 1993 07:23:06 +0200

In response to Smoliar : > Lerdahl and Jackendoff have problems Don't we all. No theory of music or language that I know of is complete. What is of interest experimentally is to test what they have formalized at various levels of the theory. One level concerns melodic grouping, though it is clear, and I agree with Smoliar on this point, other levels of sectional grouping may be based on textural and figural properties (see Clarke & Krumhansl in Music Perception, Deliege & El Ahmadi in Psychology of Music). I think we will find that such things are based on discontinuities in surface properties and are relatively universal as segmentation procedures. > edge detection in vision This is probably the direct equivalent of durational and qualitative discontinuity detection in audition. Where a discontinuity occurs, we establish a boundary, though where that boundary falls exactly may be ambiguous in melodic grouping as Deliege has shown. The edge of a texture may also be fuzzy depending on the temporal properties of the musical texture and on the degree of similarity of two adjoining textures. If I recall correctly, John MacKay did some work on this in the realm of contemporary music at U.C. San Diego in the early 80s. > the interesting research question is one of whether or not existing computer > vision techniques can be adapted to audio signals. I think we'd better figure out more systematically what features human listeners are sensitive to before we run off and start modeling the beast. Stephen McAdams


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