Related papers: Do Melody and Rhythm Coevolve?
The standard theory of musical scales since antiquity has been based on harmony, rather than melody. While recent analyses provide mixed support for a role of melody as well as harmony, we lack a comparative analysis based on cross-cultural…
The number of possible melodies is unfathomably large, yet despite this virtually unlimited potential for melodic variation, melodies from different societies can be surprisingly similar. The motor constraint hypothesis accounts for certain…
Understanding the structural characteristics of harmony is essential for an effective use of music as a communication medium. Of the three expressive axes of music (melody, rhythm, harmony), harmony is the foundation on which the emotional…
Melody is one of the most important components in music. Unlike other components in music theory, such as harmony and counterpoint, computable features for melody is urgently in need. These features are highly demanded as data-driven…
There has been an everlasting discussion around the concept of form in music. This work is motivated by such debate by using a complex systems framework in which we study the form as an emergent property of rhythm. Such a framework…
Research on how humans perceive aesthetics in shapes, colours, and music has predominantly focused on Western populations, limiting our understanding of how cultural environments shape aesthetic preferences. We present a large-scale…
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…
Music, enchanting and poetic, permeates every corner of human civilization. Although music is not unfamiliar to people, our understanding of its essence remains limited, and there is still no universally accepted scientific description.…
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…
Popular music is a key cultural expression that has captured listeners' attention for ages. Many of the structural regularities underlying musical discourse are yet to be discovered and, accordingly, their historical evolution remains…
Definitive embeddings remain a fundamental challenge of computational musicology for symbolic music in deep learning today. Analogous to natural language, music can be modeled as a sequence of tokens. This motivates the majority of existing…
The ubiquity of digital music consumption has made it possible to extract information about modern music that allows us to perform large scale analysis of stylistic change over time. In order to uncover underlying patterns in cultural…
Creativity, or the ability to produce new useful ideas, is commonly associated to the human being; but there are many other examples in nature where this phenomenon can be observed. Inspired by this fact, in engineering and particularly in…
Scales, sets of discrete pitches that form the basis of melodies, are thought to be one of the most universal hallmarks of music. But we know relatively little about cross-cultural diversity of scales or how they evolved. To remedy this, we…
Music plays a huge part in shaping peoples' psychology and behavioral patterns. This paper investigates the connection between national anthems and different global indices with computational music analysis and statistical correlation…
In modern societies, cultural change seems ceaseless. The flux of fashion is especially obvious for popular music. While much has been written about the origin and evolution of pop, most claims about its history are anecdotal rather than…
Understanding how cognitive and social mechanisms shape the evolution of complex artifacts such as songs is central to cultural evolution research. Social network topology (what artifacts are available?), selection (which are chosen?), and…
In pop music, accompaniments are usually played by multiple instruments (tracks) such as drum, bass, string and guitar, and can make a song more expressive and contagious by arranging together with its melody. Previous works usually…
Music is a complex socio-cultural construct, which fascinates researchers in diverse fields, as well as the general public. Understanding the historical development of music may help us understand perceptual and cognition, while also…
Despite the recent increase in research on artificial intelligence for music, prominent correlations between key components of lyrics and rhythm such as keywords, stressed syllables, and strong beats are not frequently studied. This is…