Page 1 of 1

Tenor Conference 2015, proceedings

Posted: 04 Mar 2016, 13:10
by OCTO

Re: Tenor Conference 2015, proceedings

Posted: 04 Mar 2016, 13:58
by David Ward
Very interesting; but, heavens, what a lot of it!

Any advice, OCTO (or anyone else) about which of these many, many PDFs might be most useful to read? (I suppose I may mean “might be most useful for me to read,” but that seems a bit self-centred.)

Re: Tenor Conference 2015, proceedings

Posted: 04 Mar 2016, 21:38
by MJCube
I have tried to skim the website content, and I got through the morning session. Here’s what I have been able to glean so far. (Warning: many opinions expressed!)

INScore appears to have nothing to do with music as I know it. No offense intended; I didn’t see anything in the demo PDF that made any sense to me as music or art.

LeadsheetJS looks quite useful.

Bigram Notation and Binary MIDI instruments are a typically atonal approach based on 12-tone equal temperament as the only available pitches, just like MIDI. This has been tried many times before, and didn’t catch on then. The chromatic excerpt from Liszt portrays tonal chaos and careening danger before settling on the dominant harmony again. I can understand the desire to make more readable notation for such music, but the overriding fact is that what we have come to call Common Music Notation (CMN) has a strong bias for tonality. I believe that tonality, with its many asymmetries and tuning challenges, is why no other notation system has achieved any widespread use.

Expressive Quantization of Complex Rhythmic Structures for Automatic Music Transcription: Another area where I feel that all this work on algorithms does not actually serve art in the end. Of course we can use technology to analyze performed rhythms to a much finer degree than by simply listening. But not one of the notation examples in the PDF is musically coherent to human eyes. Bartók pointed us down this road with his incredibly detailed notation of folk music, and IMO it’s a dead end, in that it’s consumable only by great experts in the field.

Computer-aided Transcription (Tony): As a professional transcriber of music, this is not interesting to me, because I can do better by ear, faster. It’s a huge amount of subtlety this software is trying to interpret, and there’s no substitute for human musical experience. (At what point does a chess-playing computer program take the fun out of the game completely?)

Animated Music Notation and Semaphore: It’s all very interesting avant-garde work. I am agnostic about the quality of art that may be achieved through these means. It remains to be seen (probably by future generations). “The Decibel ScorePlayer App provides a new, more accurate and reliable way to coordinate performances of music where harmony and pulse are not the primary elements described by notation.” — That says it all to me. What is left when music lacks harmony and pulse? Fundamentally, I don’t know what it’s for.

Automatized transcription of Dunhuang pipa scores: After 2 minutes I could not tolerate the presenter’s accent, so I had to stop watching. I guess that’s it for me for today.

Re: Tenor Conference 2015, proceedings

Posted: 05 Mar 2016, 08:38
by OCTO
As far as I can see, this conference and the texts provided there are much more concerned about "new notation tools" rather than "how to notate this".

Some software based on PWGL (a tool many spectralists use, such Saariaho) - mostly ENP, is represented quite often. I find it interesting and I am definitely curious how will the notation software develop in the future.

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk