Bibliography by Subject for Roger Dannenberg

(Click here for resume-style bibliography)

Multimedia

See also The Tactus Project and Related Synchronization Papers and Performance Interfaces.

Blattner and Dannenberg, eds., Multimedia Interface Design, ACM Press, 1992. (Also published in Chinese, 1994.)

This book resulted from a workshop at CHI'90. It's a collection of papers organized by general topic. At the time, corporations (esp. Apple) were pushing what we thought was a very narrow view of multimedia and we thought it would be a good idea to present a collection that spanned a wide range of technology and applications.

Rob Fisher, Paul Vanouse, Roger Dannenberg, and Jeff Christensen, “Audience Interactivity: A Case Study in Three Perspectives Including Remarks About a Future Production,” in Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Symposium for Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, (February 1997).

Audience interactivity was a primary element of a major planetarium production about cell biology entitled “Journey into the Living Cell." The artist/authors were directly involved with the design of the production from concept to realization. Rob Fisher was the Project, Artistic and Technical Director. Paul Vanouse was Assistant Director responsible for the design and production of the interactive visual portions of the show. Roger Dannenberg directed the interactive audio portions and was responsible for the interactive audio system with the assistance of Jeff Christensen. The following paper provides background about the production and our varied perspectives on the use of the innovative interactive system. In addition, a future production currently pending approval of an NSF grant will be described. This new show about the brain builds upon the experiences gained in the cell project and sheds light on features of audience interactivity that point to some startling conclusions about group behavior.
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Dannenberg, Witkin, and Fisher, Method and apparatus for interactive audience participation by audio command. US Patent #798382, 1997.

An interactive audience participation system which utilizes audio command signals, such as loudness or sound intensity, transmitted by different audience groups. These respective audio command signals are detected to determine the aggregate of the signals for each group and then the detected aggregates are converted into data. An audience sensed interactive communication medium device, such as a large stadium video screen, is correspondingly manipulated by the detected data so that the audience may play a competitive or collaborative game.

Roger Dannenberg and Rob Fisher, “An Audience-Interactive Multimedia Production on the Brain” in Proceedings of the Symposium for Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, (March 2001).

A multimedia planetarium show, “Gray Matters: The Brain Movie,” was created to teach fundamental scientific concepts about the human brain. During the show, the planetarium dome represents a giant brain enclosing the audience. Audience members play the role of neurons in various simulations and representations of brain function. This leads to new ways of thinking about audience interactivity in theaters, with many applications to art and entertainment. Some of the problems of large art/science collaborations are also discussed.
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Dannenberg, “Interactive Visual Music: A Personal Perspective,” Computer Music Journal, 29(4) (Winter 2005), pp. 25-35.

Interactive performance is one of the most innovative ways computers can be used in music, and it leads to new ways of thinking about music composition and performance. Interactive performance also poses many technical challenges, resulting in new languages and special hardware including sensors, synthesis methods, and software techniques. As if there are not already enough problems to tackle, many composers and artists have explored the combination of computer animation and music within interactive performances. In this article, I describe my own work in this area, dating from around 1987, including discussions of artistic and technical challenges as they have evolved. I also describe the Aura system, which I now use to create interactive music, animation, and video.
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Dannenberg and Bernstien, “‘Origin, Direction, Location’: An Installation” in Proceedings of the 10th Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, New London, Connecticut: Connecticut College, (2006).

An interactive installation uses microphones to capture sounds from participants. Sounds activate images, causing them to display and transform. Sounds are also processed, mixed, and fed back into the gallery space. Inspired by Buddist teachings, the piece emerges from and is created by the participants.
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Real-Time Control

See
Functional Languages for Real-Time Control,

and Interactive Performance,

and Performance Interfaces,

and Real-Time Scheduling/Dispatching

and The Tactus Project and Related Synchronization Papers,

and Real-time software section


Dannenberg and Jameson, “Real-Time Issues in Computer Music,” in Proceedings of the Real-Time Systems Symposium, Raleigh-Durham, NC, December 1-3, 1993. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1993. pp. 258-261.

ABSTRACT: Real-time systems are essential to computer music, and new developments in scheduling, operating systems, and languages are certain to find applications in music. At the same time, we believe the issues that arise in computer music should be of interest to designers of real-time systems. Computer music systems are demanding and complex, and require a large degree of flexibility to support the creative goals of musicians. Musicians and composers were working in the “real-time business” long before the computer, and we think the art and science of music-making has much to offer
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Program Verification

See Program Verification

Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Dannenberg, Dormann, Keaton, Seacord, Svoboda, Volkovitsky, Wilson, and Plum, “As-If Infinitely Ranged Integer Model,” in Proceedings of 2010 IEEE 21st International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, San Jose, CA, USA, November 2010, pp. 91-100.

ABSTRACT: Integers represent a growing and underestimated source of vulnerabilities in C and C++ programs. This paper presents the As-if Infinitely Ranged (AIR) Integer model for eliminating vulnerabilities resulting from integer overflow, truncation, and unanticipated wrapping. The AIR Integer model either produces a value equivalent to that obtained using infinitely ranged integers or results in a runtime-constraint violation. With the exception of wrapping (which is optional), this model can be implemented by a C99-conforming compiler and used by the programmer with little or no change to existing source code. Fuzz testing of libraries that have been compiled using a prototype AIR integer compiler has been effective in discovering vulnerabilities in software with low false positive and false negative rates. Furthermore, the runtime overhead of the AIR Integer model is low enough that typical applications can enable it in deployed systems for additional runtime protection.
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Dannenberg and P. Hibbard, “A Butler Process for Resource Sharing on Spice Machines,” Transactions on Office Information Systems, Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1985), pp. 234-252.

A network of personal computers may contain a large amount of distributed computing resources. For a number of reasons it is desirable to share these resources, but sharing is complicated by issues of security and autonomy. A process known as the Butler addresses these problems and provides support for resource sharing. The Butler relies upon a capability-based accounting system called the Banker to monitor the use of local resources.
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Dannenberg, “Protection for Communication and Sharing in A Personal Computer Network,” in Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Distributed Computer Systems, Denver, Colorado. May 13-17, 1985. Silver Spring: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1985. pp. 88-98.

ABSTRACT: The autonomy offered to users by most personal computer systems creates new problems for communication and sharing. Protection is required if personal computer networks are to attain the same level of user cooperation as is now possible in time-shared systems. A design is presented for protected communication that relys upon a secure high-level interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism and its extension across machine boundaries using encryption techniques. Protocols and support for authentication (identity certification) and authorization (rights certification) can be built upon the underlying IPC facility. To support resource sharing, an accounting process called the Banker is used to maintain a record of a borrower's resouce utilization, and a sharing supervisor, called the Butler, is used to administrer a locally determined sharing policy.
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Dannenberg, “AMPL: Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of A Multiprocessing Language,” CMU Tech Report CMU-CS-82-116, 1982.

Dannenberg, “Resource Sharing In A Network Of Personal Computers,” CMU, 1982 (Ph.D. Thesis)

Brandt and Dannenberg, “Low-Latency Music Software Using Off-The-Shelf Operating Systems,” in Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference, San Francisco: International Computer Music Association, (1998), pp.137-141.


Human Computer Interaction


Myers, Giuse, Dannenberg, Vander Zanden, Kosbie, Pervin, Mickish, and Marchal, “Garnet: Comprehensive Support for Graphical, Highly Interactive User Interfaces,” Computer 23(11), 1990, pp. 71-85.
ABSTRACT: The Garnet research project, which is creating a set of tools to aid the design and implementation of highly interactive, graphical, direct-manipulation user interfaces, is discussed. Garnet also helps designers rapidly develop prototypes for different interfaces and explore various user-interface metaphors during early product design. It emphasizes easy specification of object behavior, often by demonstration and without programming. Garnet contains a number of different components grouped into two layers. The Garnet Toolkit (the lower layer) supplies the object-oriented graphics system and constraints, a set of techniques for specifying the objects' interactive behavior in response to the input devices, and a collection of interaction techniques. On top of the Garnet Toolkit layer are a number of tools to make creating user interfaces easier. The components of both layers are described.
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Dannenberg and Amon, “A Gesture Based User Interface Prototyping System,” in Proceedings of the 2nd annual ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Williamsburg, WV, November 13-15 1989. New York: ACM, 1989. pp. 127-132.

ABSTRACT: GID, for Gestural Interface Designer, is an experimental system for prototyping gesture-based user interfaces. GID structures an interface as a collection of “controls”: objects that maintain an image on the display and respond to input from pointing and gesture-sensing devices. GID includes an editor for arranging controls on the screen and saving screen layouts to a file. Once an interface is created, GID provides mechanisms for routing input to the appropriate destination objects even when input arrives in parallel from several devices. GID also provides low level feature extraction and gesture representation primitives to assist in parsing gestures.
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Myers, Vander Zanden, and Dannenberg, “Creating Graphical Interactive Application Objects by Demonstration,” in Proceedings of the 2nd annual ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, Williamsburg, WV, November 13-15 1989. New York: ACM, 1989. pp. 95-104.

ABSTRACT: The Lapidary user interface tool allows all pictorial aspects of programs to be specified graphically. In addition, the behavior of these objects at run-time can be specified using dialogue boxes and by demonstration. In particular, Lapidary allows the designer to draw pictures of application-specific graphical objects which will be created and maintained at run-time by the application. This includes the graphical entities that the end user will manipulate (such as the components of the picture), the feedback that shows which objects are selected (such as small boxes on the sides and corners of an object), and the dynamic feedback objects (such as hair-line boxes to show where an object is being dragged). In addition, Lapidary supports the construction and use of “widgets” (sometimes called interaction techniques or gadgets) such as menus, scroll bars, buttons and icons. Lapidary therefore supports using a pre-defined library of widgets, and defining a new library with a unique “look and feel.” The run-time behavior of all these objects can be specified in a straightforward way using constraints and abstract descriptions of the interactive response to the input devices. Lapidary generalizes from the specific example pictures to allow the graphics and behaviors to be specified by demonstration.
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Education

Frances K. Dannenberg, Roger B. Dannenberg, and Philip Miller, “Teaching Programming to Musicians,” in 1984 Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Symposium on Small Computers in the Arts (October 1984), pp. 114-122.

ABSTRACT: A new approach has been developed for teaching programming to musicians. The approach uses personal computers with music synthesis capabilities, and students write programs in order to realize musical compositions. Our curriculum emphasizes abstraction in programming by the early introduction of high-level concepts and the late introduction of programming language details. We also emphasize abstraction by relating programming concepts to musical concepts which are already familiar to our students. We have successfully used this curriculum to teach Pascal to children and we are presently using it in a university-level course for composers.
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Dannenberg and Capell, “Are Just-In-Time Lectures Effective at Teaching?,” (unpublished report from the Just-In-Time Lectures Consortium website), 1997.
ABSTRACT: A “Just-In-Time Lecture” is a low-cost, flexible technology for creating and presenting educational material to groups and individuals. A review of learning concepts and education research supports the notion that Just-In-Time Lecture technology should be as effective as traditional classroom instruction. This finding is based on (1) a large body of research on related technologies, including television and videodisc training, (2) the fact that classroom instruction translates directly to the Just-In-Time Lecture medium, (3) the applicability of Just-In-Time Lectures to a variety of skill categories (e.g. Bloom’s taxonomy), and (4) positive experience using Just-In-Time Lectures at two universities for classroom and individual instruction.
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Xia, Jacobsen, Chen, Dannenberg, and Yang, “ShIFT: A Semi-haptic Interface for Flute Tutoring,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2018, pp. 162-167.

ABSTRACT: Traditional instrument learning procedure is time-consuming; it begins with learning music notations and necessitates layers of sophistication and abstraction. Haptic interfaces open another door to the music world for the vast majority of talentless beginners when traditional training methods are not effective. However, the existing haptic interfaces can only be used to learn specially designed pieces with great restrictions on duration and pitch range due to the fact that it is only feasible to guide a part of performance motion haptically for most instruments. Our study breaks such restrictions using a semi-haptic guidance method. For the first time, the pitch range of the haptically learned pieces go beyond an octave (with the fingering motion covers most of the possible choices) and the duration of learned pieces cover a whole phrase. This significant change leads to a more realistic instrument learning process. Experiments show that semi-haptic interface is effective as long as learners are not "tone deaf". Using our prototype device, the learning rate is about 30% faster compared with learning from videos.
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See also: The Piano Tutor


Computer Systems

Dannenberg, “An Architecture With Many Operand Registers to Efficiently Execute Block Structured Languages,” in Proceedings of the 6th Annual Symposium on Computer Architecture, Philadelphia, PA, April 1979. New York: ACM, 1979. pp. 50-57.
ABSTRACT: Register allocation schemes are presented that effectively use many registers in the execution of block-structured languages. Simulation statistics for a machine with many registers and a conventional architecture are compared. The results indicate that the average operand access time and the required memory bandwidth of conventional machines can be significantly reduced. The implications of the register allocation schemes for machine architecture are discussed.
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Dannenberg, “On Machine Architecture for Structured Programs,” Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 22,5 (May 1979), p. 311, (technical correspondence).


Computer Music

The single-level ICMA taxonomy is listed here, with my publications inserted at the appropriate points.

Acoustics of musical instruments and voice

Aesthetics, philosophy, and criticism

Dannenberg and Bates, “A Model for Interactive Art,” in Proceedings of the Fifth Biennial Symposium for Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, (March 1995), pp. 103-111.

ABSTRACT: The new technologies of computer systems and artificial intelligence enable new directions in art. One new direction is the creation of highly interactive works based on computation. We describe several interactive artworks and show that there are strong similarities that transcend categories such as drama, music, and dance. Examining interactive art as a general approach, we identify one important dimension of variability having to do with the degree to which the art is focused on the process of interaction as opposed to generating a final product. The model that results from our analysis suggests future directions and forms of interactive art. We speculate what some of these new forms might be like.
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Dannenberg, “Extending Music Notation Through Programming,” in Computer Music in Context, Craig Harris, ed., Contemporary Music Review series, Vol. 13, Part 2, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996, pp. 63-76.

ABSTRACT:Traditional notation has led to the continuation of a traditional music approach in which scores are static descriptions to be realized by performers. Borrowing programming concepts from computer science leas to score-like descriptions with the capability of expressing dynamic processes and interaction with performers. The implications for composition, performance, and future research are discussed.
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Aesthetics: see also

Artificial Intelligence in Music

See
Music Understanding, Computer Accompaniment, Beat Tracking, Performance Style Classification, and The Piano Tutor.

Thom and Dannenberg, “Predicting Chords in Jazz,” in Proceedings of the 1995 International Computer Music Conference, Banff, Alberta, Canada, September 1995. International Computer Music Association, 1995. pp. 237-238.

ABSTRACT: Instance-based machine learning techniques have been applied to predict the next chord in a piece of jazz music. This study compares off-line (trained on a static database of songs) and on-line (trained on-the-fly) prediction techniques. A hybrid model combines both on-line and off-line models. On average, chords in a jazz piece are 53 +- 17% of the time using the hybrid model. Successful predictions are defined as exact matches of chord root and type.

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Tzanetakis, Hu, and Dannenberg, “Toward an Intelligent Editor for Jazz Music,” Digital Media Processing for Multimedia Interactive Services: Proceedings of the 4th European Workshop on Image Analysis for Multimedia Interactive Services, London, UK, 9-11 April 2003. Ed. Ebroul Izquierdo. Singapore: World Scientific Press 2002. pp. 332-333.
ABSTRACT: The majority of existing work in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) has been concerned with the similarity relations between different pieces of music rather than their internal structure and content. Although a limited number of automatic techniques for analyzing the internal structure and content of musical signals (such as segmentation and structural analysis) have been proposed, there has been little work in integrating these techniques into a common working environment for music understanding. In addition, because of the emerging nature of MIR research, it is necessary to provide interactive tools for experimentation with new algorithms and ideas. As a first step in this direction, a prototype “intelligent” editor for Jazz music has been implemented and is used as a platform for exploring various analysis algorithms and how they can be integrated into a working interactive system. Jazz standards were chosen as a test bed for the developed system because they have many variations, rich internal structures, and raise interesting research challenges. In this paper, we describe the main motivations behind the editor, the algorithms and tools that are currently supported, and our plans for future work.

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Chen, Dannenberg, Raj, and Singh, “Artificial Creative Intelligence: Breaking the Imitation Barrier,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computational Creativity (ICCC 2020), Association for Computational Creativity, 2020.
ABSTRACT: Not all knowledge is created equal. A hierarchical architecture is a method to classify knowledge for use in the field of human cognition and computational creativity. This paper introduces an Insight-Knowledge Object (IKO) model as a framework for Artificial Creative Intelligence (ACI), a step forward in the pursuit of replicating general human intelligence with computing machinery. To achieve ACI, it is hypothesized that a fundamental rethinking of the architecture of human cognition and knowledge processing is required. One possible novel architecture could be the IKO model. The authors include a description of on-going work at Carnegie Mellon University that applies the IKO model in practice with an artificial music improvisation embodiment.

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Dannenberg, “Some Histories and Futures of Making Music with Computers,” in Korean Electro-Acoustic Music Society's 2020 Annual Conference Proceedings, 2020, pp. 7-14.

ABSTRACT: Having spent decades working in the field of Computer Music, I review some major trends of artistic and scientific development in the field with an eye to the future. While the implications of exponential computational growth are hard to predict, it seems that musical imperatives remain stable; thus, they will continue to guide us in the future. I predict a number of “futures” for Computer Music based on the persistent themes of sound creation, music representation, and music performance.

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Dai, Jin, Gomes, and Dannenberg, “Controllable Deep Melody Generation via Hierarchical Music Structure Representation,” in Proceedings of the 22nd International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Online, Nov 2021, pp. 143-150.

ABSTRACT: Recent advances in deep learning have expanded possibilities to generate music, but generating a customizable full piece of music with consistent long-term structure remains a challenge. This paper introduces MusicFrameworks, a hierarchical music structure representation and a multi-step generative process to create a full-length melody guided by long-term repetitive structure, chord, melodic contour, and rhythm constraints. We first organize the full melody with section and phrase-level structure. To generate melody in each phrase, we generate rhythm and basic melody using two separate transformer-based networks, and then generate the melody conditioned on the basic melody, rhythm and chords in an auto-regressive manner. By factoring music generation into sub-problems, our approach allows simpler models and requires less data. To customize or add variety, one can alter chords, basic melody, and rhythm structure in the music frameworks, letting our networks generate the melody accordingly. Additionally, we introduce new features to encode musical positional information, rhythm patterns, and melodic contours based on musical domain knowledge. A listening test reveals that melodies generated by our method are rated as good as or better than human-composed music in the POP909 dataset about half the time.

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Dai, Yu, and Dannenberg, “What is Missing in Deep Music Generation? A Study of Repetition and Structure in Popular Music,” in Proceedings of the 23rd International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Online, Nov 2022 (to appear).

ABSTRACT: Structure is one of the most essential aspects of music, and music structure is commonly indicated through repetition. However, the nature of repetition and structure in music is still not well understood, especially in the context of music generation, and much remains to be explored with Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques. Analyses of two popular music datasets (Chinese and American) illustrate important music construction principles: (1) structure exists at multiple hierarchical levels, (2) songs use repetition and limited vocabulary so that individual songs do not follow general statistics of song collections, (3) structure interacts with rhythm, melody, harmony and predictability, and (4) over the course of a song, repetition is not random, but follows a general trend as revealed by cross-entropy. These and other findings offer challenges as well as opportunities for deep-learning music generation and suggest new formal music criteria and evaluation methods. Music from recent music generation systems is analyzed and compared to human-composed music in our datasets, often revealing striking differences from a structural perspective.

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Audio analysis and resynthesis

Woodruff, Pardo, and Dannenberg, “Remixing Stereo Music with Score-Informed Source Separation,” in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, Victoria, BC, Canada, October 2016, pp. 314-319.

ABSTRACT: Musicians and recording engineers are often interested in manipulating and processing individual instrumental parts within an existing recording to create a remix of the recording. When individual source tracks for a stereo mixture are unavailable, remixing is typically difficult or impossible, since one cannot isolate the individual parts. We describe a method of informed source separation that uses knowledge of the written score and spatial information from an anechoic, stereo mixture to isolate individual sound sources, allowing remixing of stereo mixtures without access to the original source tracks. This method is tested on a corpus of string quartet performances, artificially created using Bach four-part chorale harmonizations and sample violin, viola and cello recordings. System performance is compared in cases where the algorithm has knowledge of the score and those in which it operates blindly. The results show that source separation performance is markedly improved when the algorithm has access to a well-aligned score.

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Dannenberg, “An Intelligent Multi-Track Audio Editor,” in Proceedings of the 2007 International Computer Music Conference, Volume II. San Francisco: The International Computer Music Association, (August 2007), pp. II-89 - 94.

ABSTRACT. Audio editing software allows multi-track recordings to be manipulated by moving notes, correcting pitch, and making other fine adjustments,but this is a tedious process. An “intelligent audio editor” uses a machine-readable score as a specification for the desired performance and automatically makes adjustments to note pitch, timing, and dynamic level.

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See also Spectral Interpolation

Audio hardware design

Composition systems and techniques

Dai, Ma, Wang, and Dannenberg, “Personalized Popular Music Generation Using Imitation and Structure,” Journal of New Music Research, (2023).

ABSTRACT.Many practices have been presented in music generation recently. While stylistic music generation using deep learning techniques has became the main stream, these models still struggle to generate music with high musicality, different levels of music structure, and controllability. In addition, more application scenarios such as music therapy require imitating more specific musical styles from a few given music examples, rather than capturing the overall genre style of a large data corpus. To address requirements that challenge current deep learning methods, we propose a statistical machine learning model that is able to capture and imitate the structure, melody, chord, and bass style from a given example seed song. An evaluation using 10 pop songs shows that our new representations and methods are able to create high-quality stylistic music that is similar to a given input song. We also discuss potential uses of our approach in music evaluation and music therapy.

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Diffusion, sonorization

William D. Haines, Jesse R. Vernon, Roger B. Dannenberg, and Peter F. Driessen, “Placement of Sound Sources in the Stereo Field Using Measured Room Impulse Responses,” in Proceedings of the 2007 International Computer Music Conference, Volume I. San Francisco: The International Computer Music Association, (August 2007), pp. I-496 - 499.
This paper was selected for inclusion in a post-proceedings publication (see below), which contains an expanded version of the paper. Subsequent research (unpublished) revealed some important new results. First, our model of commercial convolution-based reverb was not complete. While we did find some use of the simple model in our paper (left channel convolved with a left impulse response and right channel convolved with a right impulse response), the best-sounding commercial reverb we found uses 4 impulse responses: left input to left output, left input to right output, right input to right output, and right input to right output. This is beginning to approximate our “placed” convolution reverb which does two convolutions (left and right) on each of N inputs (sound sources). In our tests, N = 3, which is not far from the commercial systems (N = 2). Our recent tests with only 10 subjects did not show significant preference, and to our ears, the results are only better with certain materials. We want to explore what conditions favor “placed” convolution and do a larger study in the future.

ABSTRACT. Current advances in techniques have made it possible to simulate reverberation effects in real world performance spaces by convolving dry instrument signals with physically measured impulse response data. Such reverberation effects have recently become commonplace; however, current techniques apply a single effect to an entire ensemble, and then separate individual instruments in the stereo field via panning. By measuring impulse response data from each instrument's desired location, it is possible to place instruments in the stereo field using their unique initial reflection and reverberation patterns. A pilot study compares the perceived quality of dry signals convolved to stereo center, convolved to stereo center and panned to desired placement, and convolved with measured impulse responses to simulate actual placement. The results of a single blind study show a conclusive preference for location-based reverberation effects.

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William D. Haines, Jesse R. Vernon, Roger B. Dannenberg, and Peter F. Driessen, “Placement of Sound Sources in the Stereo Field Using Measured Room Impulse Responses.” In R. Kronland-Martinet, S. Ystad, and K. Jensen (Eds.): Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval. Sense of Sounds, Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS 4969, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 276-287, 2008.
Please see my notes above about subsequent research.

ABSTRACT. Reverberation can be simulated by convolving dry instrument signals with physically measured impulse response data. Such reverberation effects have recently become commonplace; however, current techniques apply a single effect to an entire ensemble, and then separate individual instruments in the stereo field via panning. By measuring impulse response data from each desired instrument location, it is possible to place instruments in the stereo field using their unique early reflection and reverberation patterns without panning. A pilot study compares the perceived quality of dry signals convolved to stereo center, convolved to stereo center and panned to desired placement, and convolved with measured impulse responses to simulate placement. The results of a single blind study show a preference for location-based (as opposed to panning-based) reverberation effects.

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History of electroacoustic music

Interactive performance systems

See Interactive Performance and Performance Interfaces.

Machine recognition of audio signals

See also “Machine recognition of music data” (below) and its sub-topics.

Goto and Dannenberg, “Music Interfaces Based on Automatic Music Signal Analysis,” IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, 36(1) (January, 2019), pp. 74-81.

ABSTRACT: Music analysis based on signal processing offers new ways of creating and listening to music. This article focuses on applications and interfaces that are enabled by advances in automatic music analysis. By using signal processing, some of these applications provide nonexperts the chance to enjoy music in their daily lives, while other applications apply signal processing to enhance professional music production and create new opportunities for composers and performers. Described in this article are the history and state of the art of music interfaces as well as its future directions that emphasize interactive music applications based on automatic music signal analysis.
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Machine recognition of music data

See
Music Understanding, Beat Tracking, Performance Style Classsification, Performance Interfaces, Artificial Intelligence in Music, and Computer Accompaniment.

Law, von Ahn, Dannenberg, and Crawford. “TagATune: A Game for Music and Sound Annotation,” in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, ISMIR 2007, Vienna, Austria (September 2007), pp. 361-364.

ABSTRACT: Annotations of audio files can be used to search and index music and sound databases, provide data for system evaluation, and generate training data for machine learning. Unfortunately, the cost of obtaining a comprehensive set of annotations manually is high. One way to lower the cost of labeling is to create games with a purpose that people will voluntarily play, producing useful metadata as a by-product. TagATune is an audio-based online game that aims to extract descriptions of sounds and music from human players. This paper presents the rationale, design and preliminary results from a pilot study using a prototype of TagATune to label a subset of the FreeSound database.
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Xia, Tay, Dannenberg, and Veloso, “Autonomous Robot Dancing Driven by Beats and Emotions of Music,” in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Valencia, Spain, 4-8 June 2012. Ed. Conitzer, Winikoff, Padgham, and van der Hoek. 2012. pp. 205 - 212.

ABSTRACT: Many robot dances are preprogrammed by choreographers for a particular piece of music so that the motions can be smoothly executed and synchronized to the music. We are interested in automating the task of robot dance choreography to allow robots to dance without detailed human planning. Robot dance movements are synchronized to the beats and re ect the emotion of any music. Our work is made up of two parts: (1) The rst algorithm plans a sequence of dance movements that is driven by the beats and the emotions detected through the preprocessing of selected dance music. (2) We also contribute a real-time synchronizing algorithm to minimize the error between the execution of the motions and the plan. Our work builds on previous research to extract beats and emotions from music audio. We created a library of parameterized motion primitives, whereby each motion primitive is composed of a set of keyframes and durations and generate the sequence of dance movements from this library. We demonstrate the feasibility of our algorithms on the NAO humanoid robot to show that the robot is capable of using the mappings dened to autonomously dance to any music. Although we present our work using a humanoid robot, our algorithm is applicable to other robots.
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Tang and Dannenberg, “Extracting Commands from Gestures: Gesture Spotting and Recognition for Real-Time Music Performance,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Computer Music Multidisciplinary Research, Marseille, France, October 2013, pp. 78 - 85.

ABSTRACT: Our work allows an interactive music system to spot and recognize “command” gestures from musicians in real time. The system gives the musician gestural control over sound and the flexibility to make distinct changes during the performance by interpreting gestures as discrete commands. We combine a gesture threshold model with a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) algorithm for gesture spotting and classification. The following problems are addressed: i) how to recognize discrete commands embedded within continuous gestures, and ii) an automatic threshold and feature selection method based on F-measure to find good system parameters according to training data.
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MIDI applications

Xavier Chabot, Roger Dannenberg, Georges Bloch, “A Workstation in Live Performance: Composed Improvisation,” in Proceedings of the 1986 International Computer Music Conference, Den Haag, Netherlands, October 1986. San Francisco: International Computer Music Association, 1986. pp. 57-60.

ABSTRACT:The present work-in-progress on an instrument-computer-synthesizer system for live performance is a continuation of previously reported work by the authors at the International Computer Music Conference in 1984 and 1985. The lecture/demonstration is dedicated to the live presentation and performance of the piece “Jimmy Durante Boulevard” written by Georges Bloch. The piece features flute, trumpet and keyboard interfaced with MIDI, voice, a personal computer and a MIDI synthesizer and is based on the notion of composed improvisation which is defined in the paper. The programming environment for live performance in which the piece has been developed is presented. The piece features various types of control inputs. It has been our main concern throughout this year to study implications these controls have on the character of the music produced. A wide range of examples are covered from simple switch pedals to complex instrumental pattern data. Finally, the construction of the piece is detailed and partial examples as well as a version of the whole piece are performed live by the authors.
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Dannenberg and Bookstein, “Practical Aspects of a Midi Conducting Program,” in Proceedings of the 1991 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, (October 1991), pp. 537-540.

ABSTRACT: A MIDI-based conducting program was implemented to allow a conductor to control the tempo of a MIDI performance that accompanies a live performer. The tempo is controlled by tapping beats on a keyboard. A number of features were added in the process of preparing for a large-scale performance, a concerto for live piano and MIDI orchestra and chorus. This experience led to a number of practical suggestions.
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Miscellaneous

Dannenberg, “Foundations of Computer Music edited by Curtis Roads and John Strawn (Book Review),” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 78(6), (December 1985), pp. 2154-5.
[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Dannenberg, ed., Computer Music Video Review, International Computer Music Association (video), 1991.


Dannenberg, “A Perspective on Computer Music,” Computer Music Journal, 20(1) (Spring 1996), pp. 52-56.

This article was written for the 20th anniversary of Computer Music Journal and describes the early days of computer music in roughly the two decades from 1975 to 1995. The introduction includes this text: Computer Music Journal played a critical role in disseminating ideas from research, in fighting the isolation that comes from working in a small interdisciplinary area, and in defining the emerging field of computer music. While many of the early practitioners received their introduction to computer music through courses and residencies, many of us “learned the ropes” from the Journal’s pages. Computer Music Journal is still a major resource in the field, even with the advent of new journals and conference proceedings.

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Dannenberg, “Danger in Floating-Point-to-Integer Conversion,” (letter to editor), Computer Music Journal, 26(2), (Summer 2002), p4.

This is a letter describing the problems of rounding floating point samples to integers, which in C is a non-linear operation in terms of signal processing.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version] [(cleaner) HTML Version]

Lee, Dannenberg, and Chun. “Cancellation of Unwanted Audio to Support Interactive Computer Music,” in The ICMC 2004 Proceedings, San Francisco: The International Computer Music Association, (2004), pp. 692-698.

ABSTRACT: A real-time unwanted-audio cancellation system is developed. The system enhances recorded sound by canceling unwanted loudspeaker sounds picked up during the recording. After cancellation, the resulting sound gives an improved estimation of the live performer's sound. The cancellation works by estimating the unwanted audio signal and subtracting it from the recorded signal. The canceller is composed of a delay block and two adaptive digital filters. Our work extends conventional echo-cancellation methods to address problems we encountered in music applications. We describe a realtime implementation in Aura and present experimental results in which the proposed canceller enhances the performance of a real-time pitch detector. The cancellation ratio is measured and limitations of the system are discussed.

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Dannenberg, “Book Review: David Cope, Computer Models of Musical Creativity,” Artificial Intelligence 170 (November 2006), pp. 1218-1221.

ABSTRACT: Computer Models of Musical Creativity describes its author's many-faceted approach to music composition by computer, emphasizing the nature of creativity, how it can be modeled, and how these models are applied. I find this book especially interesting because David Cope is one of the few composer/researchers to attempt to model traditional musical styles of composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. While the musical quality of his computer-generated works has been the subject of much debate, the fact that there is any debate at all is quite an accomplishment. Just as computers and AI have raised many difficult questions about the nature of intelligence, Cope's work and this book raise questions about “creativity” - where does it come from?, can computers be creative?, and is creativity different from intelligence? While most work in computer generated music ultimately relies on human creativity or possibly serendipitous discovery filtered through human perception and selection, Cope's work is much more concerned with the construction of creative processes.
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Dannenberg, Ben Brown, Garth Zeglin, Ron Lupish, “McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player,”in Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Vancouver: University of British Columbia, (2005), pp. 80-84.

ABSTRACT: McBlare is a robotic bagpipe player developed by the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. McBlare plays a standard set of bagpipes, using a custom air compressor to supply air and electromechanical exceeds the measured speed of expert human performers. On the other hand, human performers surpass McBlare in their ability to compensate for limitations and imperfections in reeds, and we discuss future enhancements to address these problems. McBlare has been used to perform traditional bagpipe music as well as experimental computer generated music.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Dannenberg, H. Ben Brown and Ron Lupish, “McBlare: A Robotic Bagpipe Player,” in Musical Robots and Multimodal Interactive Multimodal Systems, Jorge Solis and Kig Ng, eds., Berlin: Springer-Verlag. 2011, pp. 165-178.

ABSTRACT: McBlare is a robotic bagpipe player developed by the Robotics Institute and Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University. This project has taught us some lessons about bagpipe playing and control that are not obvious from subjective human experience with bagpipes. From the artistic perspective, McBlare offers an interesting platform for virtuosic playing and interactive control. McBlare plays a standard set of bagpipes, using a custom air compressor to supply air and electromechanical “fingers” to control the chanter. McBlare is MIDI controlled, allowing for simple interfacing to a keyboard, computer, or hardware sequencer. The control mechanism exceeds the measured speed of expert human performers. McBlare can perform traditional bagpipe music as well as experimental computer-generated music. One characteristic of traditional bagpipe performance is the use of ornaments, or very rapid sequences of up to several notes inserted between longer melody notes. Using a collection of traditional bagpipe pieces as source material, McBlare can automatically discover typical ornaments from examples and insert ornaments into new melodic sequences. Recently, McBlare has been interfaced to control devices to allow non-traditional bagpipe music to be generated with real-time, continuous gestural control.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Music analysis

Dannenberg and Benade, “An Automated Approach to Tuning,” in Proceedings of the 1983 International Computer Music Conference, (October 1983).

ABSTRACT: Conventional keyboard or computer tuning systems suffer from either a lack of “natural” harmonic intervals, or the inability to support modulation. In contrast to conventional fixed-pitch systems, a variable-pitch tuning system allows small changes in pitch to obtain desirable intervals within a framework where modulation is possible. Such a system is practical only when the correct pitch variations can be determined without elaborate notation by the composer. To solve this problem, an algorithm is proposed that computes pitch from a conventional score. A modification to the basic algorithm allows a controlled amount of “equal-temperedness,” and similar algorithms can be applied to microtonal scales.

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Dai, Zhang and Dannenberg, “Automatic Analysis and Influence of Hierarchical Structure on Melody, Rhythm and Harmony in Popular Music,” in Proceedings of the 2020 Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity (CSMC-MuMe 2020), 2020.

ABSTRACT: Repetition is a basic indicator of musical structure. This study introduces new algorithms for identifying musical phrases based on repetition. Phrases combine to form sections yielding a two-level hierarchical structure. Automatically detected hierarchical repetition structures reveal significant interactions between structure and chord progressions, melody and rhythm. Different levels of hierarchy interact differently, providing evidence that structural hierarchy plays an important role in music beyond simple notions of repetition or similarity. Our work suggests new applications for music generation and music evaluation.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Music and graphics

Music data structures and representations

Dannenberg, “A Structure for Efficient Update, Incremental Redisplay and Undo in Display-Oriented Editors,” Software: Practice and Experience, 20(2) (February 1990), pp. 109-132.

ABSTRACT: The design of a graphical editor requires a solution to a number of problems, including how to (1) support incremental redisplay, (2) control the granularity of display updates, (3) provide efficient access and modification to the underlying data structure, (4) handle multiple views of the same data and (5) support Undo operations. It is most important that these problems be solved without sacrificing program modularity. A new data structure, called an ItemList, provides a solution to these problems. ItemLists maintain both multiple views and multiple versions of data to simplify Undo operations and to support incremental display updates. The implementation of ItemLists is described and the use of ItemLists to create graphical editors is presented.
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Dannenberg, “Music Representation Issues, Techniques, and Systems,” Computer Music Journal, 17(3) (Fall 1993), pp. 20-30.

This invited paper is a survey for a special issue of Computer Music Journal on music representation. It covers a lot of ground, including Levels of Representation, Hierarchy and Structure, Extensibility, Pitch, Tempo, Beat, Duration, Time, Timbre, Continuous and Discrete Data, Declarative and Procedural Representations, Resources, Instances and Streams, Protocols, and Coding. I try to describe the current practice and describe the many problems that exist. Many of these problems are still open today.
[Postscript Version] [Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Dannenberg, “A Structure for Representing, Displaying and Editing Music,” in Proceedings of the 1986 International Computer Music Conference, Den Haag, Netherlands, October 20-24, 1986. San Francisco: International Computer Music Association, 1986. pp. 153-60.

ABSTRACT: An extensible data structure has been implemented for the representation of music. The structure is intended for use in a display-oriented music editor and has several features that support interactive editing. The structure consists of a set of events, each with a list of attributevalue pairs. In addition, events can have multiple views, and an inheritance mechanism allows sharing of data between views. Multiple hierarchies can be encoded within this structure. A version system facilitates an efficient undo operation and incremental redisplay. At the same time, versions allow client programs that update the structure to be written in isolation from programs that present the structure on a graphics display.
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Dannenberg, “Music Representation: A Position Paper,” in Proceedings of the 1989 International Computer Music Conference, Kologne, Germany, October 1989. Computer Music Association, 1989. pp. 73-75.

ABSTRACT: Designing a good representation for music is challenging because there are few if any generalizations about music structure that are universal. Rather than study musical conventions, designers of music representations should focus on the extremes of musical form. A representation that generalizes to new musical forms and notation is likely to provide elegant representations for more conventional music. On the other hand, a representation based on convention will be of limited use, and could be harmful by discouraging further development.
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Dannenberg, Rubine, and Neuendorffer, “The Resource-Instance Model of Music Representation,” in Proceedings of the 1991 International Computer Music Conference, Montreal, Quebec Canada. October 1991. Eds B. Alphonce and B. Pennycook. San Francisco: International Computer Music Association, 1991. pp. 428-432.

ABSTRACT: Traditional software synthesis systems, such as Music V, utilize an instance model of computation in which each note instantiates a new copy of an instrument. An alternative is the resource model, exemplified by MIDI “mono mode,” in which multiple updates can modify a sound continuously, and where multiple notes share a single instrument. We have developed a unified, general model for describing combinations of instances and resources. Our model is a hierarchy in which resource-instances at one level generate output which is combined to form updates to the next level. The model can express complex system configurations in a natural way.
[Postscript Version] [Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Dannenberg, “Abstract Time Warping of Compound Events and Signals,” in Proceedings of the 1994 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, (September 1994), pp. 251-254.


Mazzoni and Dannenberg, “A Fast Data Structure for Disk-Based Audio Editing,” in Proceedings of the 2001 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, (September 2001), pp. 107-110.

This is the first publication on Audacity. A somewhat expanded article was prepared for Computer Music Journal (see below).

ABSTRACT:Computer music research calls for a good tool to display and edit music and audio information. Finding no suitable tools available that are flexible enough to support various research tasks, we created an open source tool called Audacity that we can customize to support annotation, analysis, and processing. The editor displays large audio files as well as discrete data including MIDI. Our implementation introduces a new data structure for audio that combines the speed of non-destructive editing with the direct manipulation convenience of in-place editors. This paper describes the data structure, its performance, features, and its use in an audio editor.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Mazzoni and Dannenberg, “A Fast Data Structure for Disk-Based Audio Editing,” Computer Music Journal, 26(2), (Summer 2002), pp. 62-76.

This is the first (maybe the only) journal article on Audacity, an open source editor that is perhaps the most popular audio editor to date, having been downloaded hundreds of millions of times.

ABSTRACT:This article examines how to combine the strengths of both in-place and non-destructive approaches to audio editing, yielding an editor that is almost as fast and reversible as a non-destructive editor, while almost as simple and space-efficient as an in-place editor. Although we create an interface that looks like that of an in-place editor, we also support multiple tracks with editable amplitude envelopes. This allows us to manipulate and combine many audio files efficiently.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Dannenberg, “The Interpretation of MIDI Velocity,” in Proceedings of the 2006 International Computer Music Conference, San Francisco, CA: The International Computer Music Association, (2006), pp. 193-196.

Real syntheizers are measured to find out how manufacturers interpret MIDI velocity.

ABSTRACT:The MIDI standard does not specify how MIDI key velocity is to be interpreted. Of course, individual synthetic instruments respond differently, but one would expect that on average, instruments will respond about the same. This study aims to determine empirically how hardware and software MIDI synthesizers translate velocity to peak RMS amplitude. Analysis shows synthesizers roughly follow an x squared rather than exponential mapping. Given a desired dynamic range (from velocity 1 to 127), a square-law mapping from velocity to RMS is uniquely determined, making dynamic range a convenient way to summarize behavior. Surprisingly, computed values of dynamic range for commercial synthesizers vary by more than 60dB.

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Jin and Dannenberg, “Formal Semantics for Music Control Flow,” in Proceedings of the 2013 International Computer Music Conference, Perth, Australia, August 2013, pp. 85-92.

ABSTRACT: Music notation includes a specification of control flow, which governs the order in which the score is read using constructs such as repeats and endings. Music theory provides only an informal description of control flow notation and its interpretation, but interactive music systems need unambiguous models of the relationships between the static score and its performance. A framework is introduced to describe music control flow semantics using theories of formal languages and compilers. A formalization of control flow answers several critical questions: Are the control flow indications in a score valid? What do the control flow indications mean? What is the mapping from performance location to static score location? Conventional notation is extended to handle practical problems, and an implementation, Live Score Display, is offered as a component for interactive music display.
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Music education

Cammuri, Dannenberg, and De Poli, “Instruction of Computer Music for Computer Engineering Students and Professionals,” in Proceedings of the 1994 International Computer Music Conference, Aarhus and Aalborg, Denmark, September 1994. International Computer Music Association, 1994. pp. 487.

ABSTRACT: Computer music is subject of courses in several scientific faculties. These activities are in general scarcely known, in spite of their importance in the training of both professionals and researchers. It is important to improve the knowledge of these activities, both for a better coordination and comparison of different experiences, and for the improvement of the state of the art. Instruction could be one of the ways, even if not the only one, to reach such a goal. Therefore, the panel aims at fostering a better awareness of these aspects and to stimulate the cooperation and the definition of new initiatives for improving the existent scenario of didactics on computer music in scientific faculties.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]


Sastre, J. Cerdà, W. García, C.A. Hernández, N. Lloret, A. Murillo, D. Picó, J. E. Serrano, S. Scarani, R.B. Dannenberg, “New Technologies for Music Education,” in Proceedings of The 2nd International Conference on E-Learning and E-Technologies in Education, Lodz, Poland, September 23-25, 2013, pp. 5974-5982.

ABSTRACT:This paper describes the objectives and work developed in the project New Technologies and Interfaces for Music Education and Production by Universitat Politècnica de València and the Computer Music Group from Carnegie Mellon University: Several education scenarios and application typologies are designed, the use of collaborative creation with Web 2.0 is proposed, and the first implemented applications are described.

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Dannenberg, Stiles, Li, and Zhang, “An Online Interactive Course on Computer Music,” in Proceedings of Looking Back, Looking Forward: 41st International Computer Music Conference, Denton, Texas USA, September 2015, pp. 28-33.

ABSTRACT: We have developed a highly interactive, online course to teach Introduction to Computer Music. The course is intended for students with a basic knowledge of programming and teaches principles and techniques of sound synthesis and algorithmic composition using a hands-on, projectoriented approach. The course contains an extensive set of short video lectures complemented by about 80 interactive, web-based exercises. Data indicates that students are able to complete the online exercises on their own and that students are highly motivated to perfect their online solutions, which offer immediate feedback through automatic grading. The online course is complemented by in-class music listening and discussion, and our intention is to offer a completely online version of the course in the near future.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]


See also The Piano Tutor


Music grammars

Music languages

See Functional Languages for Real-Time Control

and Interactive Performance.

Music printing

Music workstations

Dannenberg, McAvinney, Thomas, Bloch, Rubine, and Serra, “A Project in Computer Music: The Musician's Workbench,” in Advances in Computing and the Humanities, edited by Ephraim Nissan, (to appear).

Optical music recognition

Ringwalt, Dannenberg and Russell, “Optical Music Recognition for Interactive Score Display,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, May 2015, pp. 95-98.

ABSTRACT: Optical music recognition (OMR) is the task of recognizing images of musical scores. In this paper, we apply the first steps of optical music recognition, specifically staff, barline, and repeat detection, to automate annotation of scores for use in an interactive score display system. We developed new and simpler methods for these first steps, and show that our staff detection method outperforms existing methods on a previously used test set. Annotating staves and barlines by OMR and verifying by hand results in a 12-fold reduction in manual effort, facilitating the bulk import of a much larger collection of scores into our interactive score display system.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]


Ringwalt and Dannenberg, “Image Quality Estimation for Multi-Score OMR,” in Proceedings of the 16th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Malaga, Spain, October 2015, pp. 17-23

ABSTRACT: Optical music recognition (OMR) is the recognition of images of musical scores. Recent research has suggested aligning the results of OMR from multiple scores of the same work (multi-score OMR, MS-OMR) to improve accuracy. As a simpler alternative, we have developed features which predict the quality of a given score, allowing us to select the highest-quality score to use for OMR. Furthermore, quality may be used to weight each score in an alignment, which should improve existing systems' robustness. Using commercial OMR software on a test set of MIDI recordings and multiple corresponding scores, our predicted OMR accuracy is weakly but significantly correlated with the true accuracy. Improved features should be able to produce highly consistent results.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]


Performance interfaces

See also Interactive Performance.


Morales-Manzanares, Morales, Dannenberg and Berger, “SICIB: An Interactive Music Composition System Using Body Movements,” Computer Music Journal, 25(2) (Summer 2001), pp. 25-36.

ABSTRACT: Traditionally, music and dance have been complementary arts. However, their integration has not always been entirely satisfactory. In general, a dancer must conform movements to a predefined piece of music, leaving very little room for improvisational creativity. In this article, a system called SICIB—capable of music composition, improvisation, and performance using body movements—is described. SICIB uses data from sensors attached to dancers and “if-then” rules to couple choreographic gestures with music. The article describes the choreographic elements considered by the system (such as position, velocity, acceleration, curvature, and torsion of movements, jumps, etc.), as well as the musical elements that can be affected by them (e.g., intensity, tone, music sequences, etc.) through two different music composition systems: Escamol and Aura. The choreographic information obtained from the sensors, the musical capabilities of the music composition systems, and a simple rule-based coupling mechanism offers good opportunities for interaction between choreographers and composers. The architecture of SICIB, which allows real-time performance, is also described. SICIB has been used by three different composers and a choreographer with very encouraging results. In particular, the dancer has been involved in music dialogues with live performance musicians. Our experiences with the development of SICIB and our own insights into the relationship that new technologies offer to choreographers and dancers are also discussed.

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Schmidt, Dannenberg, Smailagic, Siewiorek, and Bruegge, “Learning an Orchestra Conductor's Technique Using a Wearable Sensor Platform,” in Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Boston, MA, October 2007, pp. 113-114.

ABSTRACT: Our study focuses on finding new input devices for a system allowing users with any skill to configure and conduct a virtual orchestra in real-time. As a first step, we conducted a user study to learn more about the interaction between a conductor's gestures and the orchestra's reaction. During an orchestra rehearsal session, we observed a conductor's timing and gestures using the eWatch, a wrist-worn wearable computer and sensor platform. The gestures are analyzed and compared to the music of the orchestra.

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Dannenberg and Wasserman, “Estimating the Error Distribution of a Single Tap Sequence without Ground Truth,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Kobe, Japan, October 2009, pp. 297-302.

ABSTRACT: Detecting beats, estimating tempo, aligning scores to audio, and detecting onsets are all interesting problems in the field of music information retrieval. In much of this research, it is convenient to think of beats as occuring at precise time points. However, anyone who has attempted to label beats by hand soon realizes that precise annotation of music audio is not possible. A common method of beat annotation is simply to tap along with audio and record the tap times. This raises the question: How accurate are the taps? It may seem that an answer to this question would require knowledge of “true” beat times. However, tap times can be characterized as a random distribution around true beat times. Multiple independent taps can be used to estimate not only the location of the true beat time, but also the statistical distribution of measured tap times around the true beat time. Thus, without knowledge of true beat times, and without even requiring the existence of precise beat times, we can estimate the uncertainty of tap times. This characterization of tapping can be useful for estimating tempo variation and evaluating alternative annotation methods.

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Dannenberg, Siewiorek, and Zahler, “Exploring Meaning and Intention in Music Conducting,” in Proceedings of the 2010 International Computer Music Conference, San Francisco: The International Computer Music Association, (August 2010), pp. 327-330.

Abstract. Conducting is a high-level form of expressive musical communication. The possibility of human-computer interaction through a conducting-based interface to a computer performance system has attracted many computer music researchers. This study explores conducting through interviews with conductors and musicians and also through accelerometers attached to conductors during rehearsals with a (human) orchestra and chamber music group. We found that “real” conducting gestures are much more subtle than “textbook” conducting gestures made in the lab, but we observed a very high correlation between the smoothed RMS amplitudes of conductors' wrist acceleration and the ensembles' audio.

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Psychoacoustics, perception, and cognition

Real-time hardware

Real-time software

See
Computer Accompaniment,

Real-Time Scheduling/Dispatching,

Interactive Performance,

Real-Time Control,

and O2: a networking protocol for music systems.

Dannenberg and Mercer, “Real-Time Software Synthesis on Superscalar Architectures,” in Proceedings of the 1992 International Computer Music Conference, International Computer Music Association, (October 1992), pp. .174-177.


Thompson and Dannenberg, “Optimizing Software Synthesis Performance,” in Proceedings of the 1995 International Computer Music Conference, Banff, Canada, September 1995. International Computer Music Association, 1995. pp. 235-236.

ABSTRACT: Sound synthesis in software on general-purpose computers offers a number of advantages over specialized hardware. Its main disadvantage is performance; however, as general purpose machines get faster, software synthesis becomes increasingly accessible. The CPUs used in the latest generation of personal computers achieve high performance using large amounts of internal parallelism in the forms of multiple functional units and deep pipelines. These performance improvements in the CPU do not, in general, carry over to the performance of the memory system, changing the importance of different optimizations. We report on several profiling experiments which suggest optimizations for these processors.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]


Dannenberg, “O2: A Network Protocol for Music Systems,” Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, vol. 2019, Article ID 8424381, 12 pages, 2019.

ABSTRACT: O2 is a communication protocol for music systems that extends and interoperates with the popular Open Sound Control (OSC) protocol. Many computer musicians routinely deal with problems of interconnection, unreliable message delivery, and clock synchronization. O2 solves these problems, offering named services, automatic network address discovery, clock synchronization, and a reliable message delivery option, as well as interoperability with existing OSC libraries and applications. Aside from these new features, O2 owes much of its design to OSC, making it easy to migrate existing OSC papplications to O2 or for developers familiar with OSC to begin using O2. O2 addresses the problems of interprocess communication within distributed music applications.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version] [Publication in Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing]


Room acoustics

Sound synthesis languages

See Fugue and Nyquist in Functional Languages for Real-Time Control

Dannenberg, “Languages for Computer Music,” Frontiers in Digital Humanities, vol. 5, article 26, 2018.

ABSTRACT: Specialized languages for computer music have long been an important area of research in this community. Computer music languages have enabled composers who are not software engineers to nevertheless use computers effectively. While powerful general-purpose programming languages can be used for music tasks, experience has shown that time plays a special role in music computation, and languages that embrace musical time are especially expressive for many musical tasks. Time is expressed in procedural languages through schedulers and abstractions of beats, duration and tempo. Functional languages have been extended with temporal semantics, and object-oriented languages are often used to model stream-based computation of audio. This article considers models of computation that are especially important for music programming, how these models are supported in programming languages, and how this leads to expressive and efficient programs. Concrete examples are drawn from some of the most widely used music programming languages.

[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Sound synthesis methods

Dannenberg and Benade, “An Automated Approach to Tuning,” in Proceedings of the 1983 International Computer Music Conference, (October 1983).

Dannenberg, “Interpolation Error in Waveform Table Lookup,” in Proceedings of the 1998 International Computer Music Conference, (1998), pp 240-243.

Previous papers analyzed the interpolation error for sinusoids. This paper looks at interpolation error for arbitrary (harmonic) waveforms, and gives some time/space tradeoffs for higher-order interpolation in software.
[Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Version] [HTML Version]

Dannenberg, Bernstein, Zeglin, and Neuendorffer, “Sound Synthesis from Video, Wearable Lights, and `The Watercourse Way',” in Proceedings The Eighth Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, New London: Connecticut College, (February 2003), pp. 38-44.

“The Watercourse Way” is a mostly-music interactive multimedia performance for violin, cello, percussion, and dancer. The work uses a computer to process sounds from the performers, to synthesize sound, and to generate computer animation. A novel synthesis technique is introduced in which the sound spectrum is controlled in real time by images of light reflected from a shallow pool of water. In addition, performers wear computer-controlled lights that respond to video and sound input, using a wireless radio link to the computer. This work explores connections between the senses using technology to both sense and generate images and sounds.
[Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Dannenberg and Neuendorffer. “Sound Synthesis from Real-Time Video Images,” in Proceedings of the 2003 International Computer Music Conference. San Francisco: International Computer Music Association, (2003), pp. 385-388.

Digital video offers an interesting source of control information for musical applications. A novel synthesis technique is introduced where digital video controls sound spectra in real time. Light intensity modulates the amplitudes of 32 harmonics in each of several synthesized “voices.” Problems addressed include how to map from video to sound dealing with global variations in light level, dealing with low frame rates of video relative to high sample rates of audio, and overall system implementation. In one application, images of light reflected from a shallow pool of water are used to control sound, offering a rich tactile interface to sound synthesis.
[Acrobat (PDF) Version]

Dannenberg, “Concatenative Synthesis Using Score-Aligned Transcriptions,” in Proceedings of the 2006 International Computer Music Conference, New Orleans, LA, November 2006. San Francisco, CA: The International Cmputer Music Association, 2006. pp. 352-355.

ABSTRACT: Concatenative synthesis assembles segments of prerecorded audio to create new sound. In this variation, prerecorded audio is labeled by aligning a polyphonic MIDI representation, essentially forming a symbolic transcription of the source material. Given a MIDI file to be synthesized, matching segments of MIDI describing the source are used to locate corresponding sound segments, which can be spliced to form the output. This technique is related to audio mosaics where similar spectral frames are substituted except that matching symbolic MIDI data allows for substitutions that are timbrally dissimilar yet harmonically and rhythmically identical.
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See Spectral Interpolation

Studio reports

Dannenberg, “Computer Music at Carnegie Mellon University,” in Music Processing, Goffredo Haus, ed., A-R Editions, 1993, pp. 303-333.

Dannenberg, McAvinney, and Thomas, “Carnegie-Mellon University Studio Report,” in Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference 1984, Paris, France, October 19-23, 1984. Ed. William Buxton. San Francisco: Computer Music Association, June 1985. pp. 281-286.

ABSTRACT: Computer music activity is taking place in three separate facilities at Carnegie-Mellon University. The Computer Music Studio is is equiped with computer, recording, and synthesis equipment, and is used for teaching, composing, and the recording of concerts. The Solfege Lab is a cluster of personal computers, some with inexpensive synthesizers attached, for computer-assisted instruction in basic music skills. The Computer Music Laboratory is a research facility that supports several projects, including Arctic, a real-time control and composition language, and Vivace, a nile-based AT system for composition. Work is also being done in the area of real-time accompaniment and the development of a personal computer music system: the Musician's Workbench.
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Dannenberg, “Systemes pour Informatique Musicale a l'universite de Carnegie Mellon,” in Actes du Symposium “Systemes Personnels et Informatique Musicale,” IRCAM, Paris, France, 1987.