DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2012, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

Iroha, composed by Kazuaki Shiota, is a composition for dance and Human Motion Wind Chimes. The goal is to explore the interdisciplinary collaboration between music and dance with technology. The name of the composition is derived from the Japanese traditional poem, Iroha, which is attributed to Buddhism and consists of a perfect pangram. The structure for the choreography of this composition, choreographed by Karen Wissel, follows the word order of the poem, in which the phrases of choreography were created based on the shapes or meanings of the 47 Japanese syllabaries. Human Motion Wind Chimes is a software-based interactive sound system that Shiota created for making a sonic environment in which dancers' movements, captured by cameras, trigger various kinds of sounds. Each measure in the score, containing the sound parameters of Human Motion Wind Chimes, directly corresponds to each phrase of choreography.

Committee: Mara Helmuth DMA (Committee Chair); Mike Fiday PhD (Committee Member); Joel Hoffman DMA (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2022, Computer Science (Engineering and Technology)

Music theoretic constructs such as tonality, harmony, and voice leading are often expressed ambiguously in music, yet the vast majority of datasets and music information retrieval systems attempt to create analyses that completely cover all musical input. Furthermore, most datasets encode a single analysis, even though the perception of the corresponding musical constructs may differ significantly among listeners, depending on individual differences such as musical sophistication and listening histories. In this thesis, an approach to key segmentation is introduced that handles music's inherent ambiguity and listener subjectivity in a feasible way through rule-based partial analyses and multiple annotations, each mapping to a different, prototypical reference listener. These partial analyses are implemented using the chord and key label outputs of an existing state-of-the- art key segmentation model. Experimental evaluations show that partial analyses that are associated with unambiguous, clear key definitions lead to higher accuracy. Additionally, evaluating on partial analyses that this model predicts with high confidence leads to higher precision without a decrease in recall. The proposed approach to musical ambiguity and listener subjectivity is expected to be applicable to other music analysis tasks, with potential improvements in the performance of music information retrieval pipelines.

Committee: Razvan Bunescu (Advisor); Yaqin Feng (Committee Member); Jundong Liu (Committee Member); David Juedes (Advisor) Subjects: Artificial Intelligence; Computer Science; Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2022, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

East, West, South, North, and Center is a piece based on neural network technology. In this piece, performers use a set of tiles of a traditional Chinese board game Mahjong as a data-driven instrument by using a camera to recognize all mahjong tiles on the table. Beyond only recognizing the pictures on each mahjong tile, it can also recognize the position and rotation angle of each tile. All those parameters give a lot of potential for a piece with rich timbres and fun interactions. With all these technologies, it tells a fictional story through my music about a family's life. In this family, every member has their own thoughts. They fight, but it won't affect the fact that they love each other and will try to fix it after every fight. A lot of problems we get in our life are always magically solved while we fix our family problems. As a traditional saying that Chinese people say all the time: everything will end in the place where it begins. The inspiration for the title East, West, South, North and Center comes from a set of the five Mahjong tiles called east, west, south, north, center. All five tiles can symbolize how people play this board game: you need four players (east, west, south, and north) sitting around a square table (center). The five elements give the basic figure of a family.

Committee: Mara (Margaret) Helmuth D.M.A. (Committee Member); Douglas Knehans D.M.A. (Committee Member); Michael Fiday Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2021, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

Figuration for piano and electronic sounds, which consists of ten movements, is basically focused on two things:

Committee: Mara (Margaret) Helmuth D.M.A. (Committee Chair); Michael Fiday Ph.D. (Committee Member); Douglas Knehans D.M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2019, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

This document discusses compositional ideas and computer music techniques employed by the composer, resulting in the interactive electro-acoustic work for solo harpsichord La nuit bleue. The selection of sounds for the electronic part is of particular interest. The design of the performer's patch in Max/MSP and the rendering of Markov chains in Max/MSP is also another important aspect of the composition discussed in this document. The use of samples from recordings of the harpsichord as the sound sources to the computer manipulation in electronics makes all sounds (harpsichord and electronics) related and creates the timbre image of the entire piece.

Committee: Mara (Margaret) Helmuth D.M.A. (Committee Chair); Michael Fiday Ph.D. (Committee Member); Douglas Knehans D.M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1993, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Education

M.M., University of Cincinnati, 2001, College-Conservatory of Music : Music History

The Jambalaya That is My Brain is a musical collage of prerecorded music and speech. The sampled material was selected from a variety of sources including Latin Jazz, American Popular Music of the R-n-B/Funk persuasion, Bosnian folk singing, movie clips, and spoken poetry. The piece was realized in the Center for Computer Music at the College-Conservatory of Music (ccm2) at the University of Cincinnati. This document is to accompany the recorded piece to explain the aesthetic and technical issues of the piece.

Committee: Henry Gwiazda (Advisor) Subjects: Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2007, College-Conservatory of Music : Composition

The Singing Bridge is a piece for percussion trio with recorded electro-acoustic music inspired by and utilizing samples from the sonic environment surrounding the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge across the Ohio River. Built in 1867 by John A. Roebling, it is an elegant steel spider-web towering 230 feet above the low water mark, with two central suspension cables that contain 5206 small wires each. It was Roebling's second to last design, predating his triumphant Brooklyn Bridge by 16 years. With the advent of automobiles, a steel grate driving surface was added that gave rise to it's popular name "The Singing Bridge," from the sound that tires make while humming across it. During the Great Depression, my grandfather braved the heights with the work crews that painted it. As a child I often begged my mother to cross it so we could sing along. Finally awakening to the personal and public significance of the sound I began regularly visiting the bridge to record it and to assemble an audio catalog of the humming tires, tugboat engines, foghorns, cable clanks, calliope music, and blasts of radios from car windows and pleasure craft that are all part of the sound life there. In collaboration with Percussion Group Cincinnati I developed a palette of corresponding instrumental sounds, many of which use rolling objects as a means of excitation similar to the tires. Tiny phrases trimmed from recorded days, were mixed, duplicated and retuned on a computer, allowing the piece to combine the bridge's sonic vocabulary with several instrumental translations. The bridge sounds are altered and superimposed more and more as the piece progresses representing the way our memories are edited by the mind the longer they are held.

Committee: Dr. Mara Helmuth (Advisor) Subjects: Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2007, College-Conservatory of Music : Piano

Music reflects the society and technology of its age. For 21st century pianists, in addition to mastering traditional solo piano and chamber repertoire, cultivating skills in performing new music and electro-acoustic music is necessary to adapt a centuries-old instrument to contemporary musical languages, aesthetics and technologies. Numerous well-known pianists have specialized in acoustic new music. The electro-acoustic music world, though, has not attracted equally prominent pianists/composers, and in general not enough pianists have specialized in electro-acoustic music. Within the field of electro-acoustic music, the genre of music for acoustic instrument(s) and tape has generated less interest recently than that using real-time sound processing. One reason for this neglect may be the mistaken belief that a fixed “tape” part does not allow for enough performance interaction and hence reduces musicality. This document investigates a number of pieces for piano and tape with respect to their performance practice, to serve a pedagogical function for both pianists and composers in both technical and aesthetic terms, and ultimately argues that music for acoustic instrument(s) and tape remains a flexible and musically valid genre. The repertoire examined includes Christopher Bailey's Balladei, Luigi Nono's …sofferte onde serene…, Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms No. 6, Jonathan Harvey's Tombeau de Messiaen, James Mobberley's Caution to the Winds and Into the Maelstrom, and Katharine Norman's Trying to Translate. These works are chosen as examples of four distinct types of music for instrument(s) and tape, categorized by the kind of interaction evident between the tape and acoustic parts. The research method includes interviews with pianists specializing in electro-acoustic music, critical reflection on my own experience of performing, and interviews with living composers whose pieces are included in this document.

Committee: Dr. Mara Helmuth (Advisor) Subjects: Education, Music; Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2006, College-Conservatory of Music : Composition

Inscape is an exploration of timbre residing within human sensation and its computer representation. The primary artistic goal of the work is to create a musical landscape through a technique known as sound collage. The collage technique enables the work to depict a continuously flowing series of soundscapes hidden inside everyday life. This thesis deals with the compositional aspects involved in Inscape. It also discusses in depth the algorithmic control of sound selection and recreation based on a stochastic process and timbre comparison employed for the piece.

Committee: Dr. Mara Helmuth (Advisor) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA), Bowling Green State University, 2010, Contemporary Music

In 1987, Morton Subotnick completed his groundbreaking composition In Two Worlds.This pioneering work was a milestone for interactive computer music with its early use of the Yamaha WX7 Wind Controller, the electronic Air Drum, and Subotnick's unique orchestration featuring solo alto saxophone, wind controller, full orchestra, and interactive computer. As a result, In Two Worlds contributed to rapid advancements in computer technology during the late 20th century as our contemporary society grew to anticipate and expect constant technological change. The instability in this environment spawned many innovations as well as rapid turnover in technology, thus forcing Subotnick to create several revisions of In Two Worlds between 1987 and 1992. Since the mid-1990s, the original hardware, software, and operating systems have become obsolete and unavailable; consequently, In Two Worlds has not been actively performed for the past decade. This study seeks to consider the following problems: 1) Should Subotnick's In Two Worlds be preserved for future performers? 2) If so, should one replicate the exact electronic parameters used in the original work, thus producing a time capsule from 1987? 3) Should performers expect continuous updates of the interactive computer patch for In Two Worlds as technology advances in the future? 4) Is there a correct or preferred version of Subotnick's multiple revisions of this work? 5) Finally, what biographical events led Subotnick to the creation of In Two Worlds and what cultural and technological environments influenced his development? This research will consider the evolution of performance, technology, and musical meaning in Morton Subotnick's In Two Worlds by examining its conception, structural revisions, and changes in technology and orchestration. With the consent of the composer, the author and Mark Bunce1 have re-created a new version of the composition by updating and replicating the interactive computer patch to Max/MSP, thu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Sampen DMA (Committee Chair); Ronald Shields PhD (Committee Member); Mark Bunce (Advisor); Jacqueline Leclair DMA (Committee Member); Kenneth Thompson DMA (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Engineering and Applied Science: Computer Science and Engineering

Musicians who perform with electronic synthesizers often adjust synthesis parameters during live performance to achieve more expressive sounds. Enabling the performer to teach a computer to make these adjustments automatically during performance frees the performer from this responsibility, while maintaining an expressive sound in line with the performer's musical vision. We have created a machine learning system called Larasynth that can be trained by a musician to make these parameter adjustments in real-time during live performances. Larasynth is trained using examples in the form of MIDI files created by the user. Learning is achieved using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks. To accomplish this, we have devised a set of features which capture the state of the synthesizer controller at regular intervals and are used to make regular predictions of parameter values using an LSTM network. To achieve sufficient generalization during training, transformations are applied to the training data set before each training epoch to simulate variations that may occur during performance. We have also created a new lightweight LSTM library suitable for small networks under real-time constraints. In this thesis we present details behind Larasynth's implementation and use, and experiments that were performed to demonstrate Larasynth's ability to learn behaviors based on different musical situations.

Committee: Anca Ralescu Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Yizong Cheng Ph.D. (Committee Member); Chia Han Ph.D. (Committee Member); Mara Helmuth D.M.A. (Committee Member); Ali Minai Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1977, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1976, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Music

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Music

This dissertation describes the motivation, methodology, structure and content of a new symbolic corpus of rap vocal transcriptions known as the Musical Corpus of Flow (MCFlow). This corpus is intended to afford and inform research into the sonic organization of rapped vocals. An operational music theory of rap is presented, identifying the most artistically important features of rapped vocals and their most basic organizational structures. This theory informs and motivates the sampling and encoding scheme of MCFlow, which is described in detail. The content of the current MCFlow dataset is described as well: the current dataset includes transcriptions of 124 hip-hop songs by 47 artists, comprising 6,107 measures of music which contain 54,248 rapped words. Several preliminary descriptive analyses of the current dataset are presented as illustrations of MCFlow's usefulness for: (1) identifying normative structures in rap; (2) comparing the styles of different artists; (3) studying the historical evolution of rap artistry. Information regarding access to MCFlow data and tools for analyzing the data are presented and the MCFlow online Graphical User Interface---usable by any user with no special software requirements---is described.

Committee: David Huron (Advisor); Graeme Boone (Committee Member); Johanna Devaney (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Science; Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2013, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

Unbearable Heaviness of Being for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, piano, and live electronics is a collection of impressions from nightmares I had when I was young. The work is divided into 6 movements. Each movement takes a specific look at the uneasy state of mind. Processing and mixing pre-recorded materials was done in the computer music studio at the University of Cincinnati. Various techniques using live sound processing were explored such as Pitch Shifting, FIR (simple finite impulse response filter in RTcmix), Octave Harmonizer, Delay/Feedback and MSHAKERS ('shaker' PhISEM and PhOLIES physical model in RTcmix).

Committee: Mara Helmuth D.M.A. (Committee Chair); Mike Fiday Ph.D. (Committee Member); Joel Hoffman D.M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2005, College-Conservatory of Music : Composition

Tabula rasa is a creative artistic endeavor in a form of a musical composition whose primary purpose is to produce an aurally and intellectually engaging work of art through cross-pollination of two seemingly disparate media. In order to establish series of inseparable aural and structural co-dependencies the piece is to utilize a real-time interaction between the traditionally trained acoustic chamber music ensemble consisting of flute, piano, and cello, and the modern day technology, namely computer.

Committee: Mara Helmuth (Advisor) Subjects: Music

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2007, Music Education/Comprehensive Music Education

The purpose of this study was to examine teacher verbalizations in band rehearsals. Three instrumental music teachers with two ensembles of different levels of playing experience were chosen as subjects. One rehearsal of each ensemble was recorded and divided into rehearsal frames. Using SCRIBE: Simple Computer Recording Interface for Behavioral Evaluation, data were collected relative to (a) aspects of music performance rehearsed, (b) sequence of instruction, (c) use of positive and negative feedback, (d) the effect of directives on student performance, and (e) articulation of performance problems in terms of instrumental technique or musical outcome. Primary attention was given to differences in teacher and student behavior depending on an ensemble's level of playing experience. Results indicated that teacher modeling of targeted music passages led to substantial improvement in student performance. All directors described musical problems in terms of musical outcome more often than as change in physical behavior. Directives requesting change in physical behavior led to successful student performance more often than those requesting a change in musical outcome.

Committee: Elaine Colprit (Advisor) Subjects: Education, Music

DMA, University of Cincinnati, 2013, College-Conservatory of Music: Composition

Physica is a four movement choral composition for SSAA women ´s choir and computer. The text is drawn from the writings of two female medieval mystics, Hildegard of Bingen (1098 AD - 1179), and Julian of Norwich (1342 - 1416). Three excerpts from Hildegard of Bingen's text Physica form the core of the first, second, and fourth movements, while excerpts from Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love appear in the third movement and juxtaposed against the Bingen text in the first movement. The work explores the unique way these women have described the natural world, by turns familiar and archaic, whimsical and prophetic. The music pays homage to Renaissance chansons and madrigals, particularly the works of composers Clement Janequin and Carlo Gesualdo, through the use of imitative counterpoint, text painting, and onomatopoetics. The computer part is triggered and synthesized live, with harmonies and textures derived from recordings of the text, and is executed in the software environment Pd-extended using my own version of the RTcmix computer music language embedded as a compiled external. As the piece progresses, the text is increasingly distorted to reveal the harmonies of the piece, and to emphasize the great emotional and intellectual distance between these two medieval women and our modern selves.

Committee: Mara Helmuth D.M.A. (Committee Chair); Mike Fiday Ph.D. (Committee Member); Joel Hoffman D.M.A. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music