Title:
Sonification of Symbolic Music in the Elvis Project
Sonification of Symbolic Music in the Elvis Project
Author(s)
Winters, R. Michael
Cumming, Julie E.
Cumming, Julie E.
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Abstract
This paper presents the development of sonification in the ELVIS
project, a collaboration in interdisciplinary musicology targeting large databases of symbolic music and tools for their systematic
analysis. An sonification interface was created to rapidly explore and analyze collections of musical intervals originating from various
composers, genres, and styles. The interface visually displays
imported musical data as a sound-file, and maps data events to
individual short, discrete pitches or intervals. The user can interact with the data by visually zoom in, making selections, playing
through the data at various speeds, and adjusting the transposition
and frequency spread of the pitches to maximize acoustic comfort and clarity. A study is presented in which rapid pitchmapping is applied to compare differences between similar corpora.
A group of 11 participants were able to correctly order collections of sonifications for three composers (Monteverdi, Bach, and Beethoven) and three presentation speeds (10², 10³, and 10⁴
notes/second). Benefits of sonification are discussed including the
ability to quickly differentiate composers, find non-obvious patterns
in the data, and ‘direct mapping’. The interface is made available as a MacOSX standalone application written in Super-
Collider.
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Date Issued
2014-06
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Text
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Proceedings
Rights Statement
This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution
– Non Commercial (unported, v3.0) License.