Audio content tools for the musicological analysis of electroacoustic music

Zattra, Laura, Nucibella, Francesca

2005

Conference Understanding and Creating Music (2005) : 27-30.

Language: English

This paper addresses an analytical approach that integrates musicological and signal processing methods. The combining of listening, sonogram and digital score analysis represented part of the challenge in devising a system to automatically analyse a 1 minute fragment of Winter leaves by Mauro Graziani (1980), a tape work realised using digital synthesis. An existing two-phased segmentation tool originally developed for tonal music by MTG Music Technology Group in Barcelona was used, this tool allows for analysis and the repeated adjustment of analytical parameters. The tool works by way of feature extraction and similarity computation, searching for acceptable structural boundaries without prior knowledge of the piece. The manual and musicological segmentation is taken as a reference for the estimation. The MUSIC 360 score reading system helps in finding timbre attributes of sound objects. Visualization is the last phase of the analysis conducted through the Music Annotator tool ( a GUI for editing previously computed high and low level descriptors), and visualization tools that highlight the tonal content of polyphonic signals.