Re: Intermediate representation for music analysis ("Richard F. Lyon" )

Subject: Re: Intermediate representation for music analysis
From:    "Richard F. Lyon"  <DickLyon@xxxxxxxx>
Date:    Mon, 17 Jul 2006 09:14:19 -0700

At 12:23 PM +0200 7/17/06, alexander lerch wrote:
>Naturally, music is made for humans, but does this mean that we need
>physiological/perceptual/cognitive models to analyze the content of
>music?

An excellent question.  In my opinion, yes.  Since the phenomena of 
greatest interest are inherently perceptual, and since human hearing 
usually works much better than any sets of algorithms that we've been 
able to come up with so far, it seems likely that it will pay to 
continue to develop approaches that attempt to mimic human 
perception, partly by modeling human physiology and cognition.

If you have a task that is not primarily perceptual, say recovering 
the notes played on a set of instruments, then it might work better 
to use physical models of the instruments and mathematical 
optimization techniques.  It would work even better to "instrument" 
the instruments with sensors that would give you more information 
than you could get from a sound waveform.

But if the task is to follow and understand a melody or a rhythm or 
other aspects of musical/perceptual language, then relying too much 
on things like "physical" notions of pitch and tempo can do more harm 
than good.

In summary, I think that "hearing" problems should be addressed with 
auditory techniques, and other problems in sound and music should be 
addressed with whatever techniques suit them best.

Dick