Score following is the process of automatically listening to a live music performance and tracking the position in the score. It is an active area of research and stands at the intersection of artificial intelligence, pattern recognition, signal processing, and musicology. Score following was first introduced in 1984 independently by Barry Vercoe and Roger Dannenberg.
In the field of computer science, artificial intelligence (AI), sometimes called machine intelligence, is intelligence demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals. Computer science defines AI research as the study of "intelligent agents": any device that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of successfully achieving its goals. More specifically, Kaplan and Haenlein define AI as “a system’s ability to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation”. Colloquially, the term "artificial intelligence" is applied when a machine mimics "cognitive" functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as "learning" and "problem solving".
Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. Pattern recognition is closely related to artificial intelligence and machine learning, together with applications such as data mining and knowledge discovery in databases (KDD), and is often used interchangeably with these terms. However, these are distinguished: machine learning is one approach to pattern recognition, while other approaches include hand-crafted rules or heuristics; and pattern recognition is one approach to artificial intelligence, while other approaches include symbolic artificial intelligence. A modern definition of pattern recognition is:
The field of pattern recognition is concerned with the automatic discovery of regularities in data through the use of computer algorithms and with the use of these regularities to take actions such as classifying the data into different categories.
Signal processing is a subfield of mathematics, information and electrical engineering that concerns the analysis, synthesis, and modification of signals, which are broadly defined as functions conveying "information about the behavior or attributes of some phenomenon", such as sound, images, and biological measurements. For example, signal processing techniques are used to improve signal transmission fidelity, storage efficiency, and subjective quality, and to emphasize or detect components of interest in a measured signal.
Artistically, it is one of the main components for live electronic music of many composers such as Pierre Boulez and Philippe Manoury among others and is currently an active line of research in different communities such as IRCAM in Paris. The latest version of IRCAM's score following, developed by the Musical Representations Team is capable of following complex audio signals (monophonic and polyphonic) and synchronize events via the detected tempo of the performance in realtime. It's distributed publicly since 2009 under the name Antescofo and has been successfully performed throughout the world for a wide number of contemporary music productions including realtime electronics.
Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez CBE was a French composer, conductor, writer and founder of institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of the post-war classical music world.
Philippe Manoury is a French composer.
IRCAM is a French institute for science about music and sound and avant garde electro-acoustical art music. It is situated next to, and is organisationally linked with, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. The extension of the building was designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. Much of the institute is located underground, beneath the fountain to the east of the buildings.
Other score following authors include Chris Raphael, Roger Dannenberg, Barry Vercoe, Miller Puckette, Nicola Orio, Arshia Cont, and Frank Weinstock ( U.S. Patent 5,952,597 ; U.S. Patent 6,107,559 ; U.S. Patent 6,166,314 ).
Barry Lloyd Vercoe is a New Zealand-born computer scientist and composer. He completed his undergraduate degree in New Zealand in Music and Mathematics and went on to complete a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, United States, in Music Composition. In 1968, Vercoe's research in Digital Audio Processing paved the way for the subsequent evolution of digital musical composition. In 1971, he joined the faculty at MIT and established the Experimental Music facility in 1973. Vercoe was a founding member of the MIT Media Lab in 1984. He continues to this day at the laboratory as a professor of Music and Media Arts and as an Associate Head of the Academic program in Media, Arts and Sciences. Notable students include Susan Frykberg, Miller Puckette, and Paris Smaragdis.
Miller Smith Puckette is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for authoring Max, a graphical development environment for music and multimedia synthesis, which he developed while working at IRCAM in the late 1980s. He is also the author of Pure Data (Pd), a real-time performing platform for audio, video and graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities.
For the first time, in October 2006, there is going to be a Score Following evaluation during the second Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). It is expected that most systems participate and compete in live musical situations and the results be announced in public domain.
Computer music is the application of computing technology in music composition, to help human composers create new music or to have computers independently create music, such as with algorithmic composition programs. It includes the theory and application of new and existing computer software technologies and basic aspects of music, such as sound synthesis, digital signal processing, sound design, sonic diffusion, acoustics, and psychoacoustics. The field of computer music can trace its roots back to the origins of electronic music, and the very first experiments and innovations with electronic instruments at the turn of the 20th century.
An electronic musical instrument is a musical instrument that produces sound using electronic circuitry. Such an instrument sounds by outputting an electrical, electronic or digital audio signal that ultimately is plugged into a power amplifier which drives a loudspeaker, creating the sound heard by the performer and listener.
A music sequencer is a device or application software that can record, edit, or play back music, by handling note and performance information in several forms, typically CV/Gate, MIDI, or Open Sound Control (OSC), and possibly audio and automation data for DAWs and plug-ins.
Csound is a computer programming language for sound, also known as a sound compiler or an audio programming language, or more precisely, an audio DSL. It is called Csound because it is written in C, as opposed to some of its predecessors.
Music information retrieval (MIR) is the interdisciplinary science of retrieving information from music. MIR is a small but growing field of research with many real-world applications. Those involved in MIR may have a background in musicology, psychoacoustics, psychology, academic music study, signal processing, informatics, machine learning, optical music recognition, computational intelligence or some combination of these.
Roger Lee Reynolds is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer. He is known for his capacity to integrate diverse ideas and resources, for the seamless blending of traditional musical sounds and those newly enabled by technology. His work responds to text of poetic or mythological origins. His reputation rests, in part, upon his “wizardry in sending music flying through space: whether vocal, instrumental, or computerized”. This signature feature first appeared in the notationally innovative theater piece, The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1961–62).
MUSIC-N refers to a family of computer music programs and programming languages descended from or influenced by MUSIC, a program written by Max Mathews in 1957 at Bell Labs. MUSIC was the first computer program for generating digital audio waveforms through direct synthesis. It was one of the first programs for making music on a digital computer, and was certainly the first program to gain wide acceptance in the music research community as viable for that task. The world's first computer-controlled music was generated in Australia by programmer Geoff Hill on the CSIRAC computer which was designed and built by Trevor Pearcey and Maston Beard. However, CSIRAC produced sound by sending raw pulses to the speaker, it did not produce standard digital audio with PCM samples, like the MUSIC-series of programs.
Max Vernon Mathews was a pioneer of computer music.
In music, transcription can mean notating a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated, as, for example, an improvised jazz solo. When a musician is tasked with creating sheet music from a recording and they write down the notes that make up the song in music notation, it is said that they created a musical transcription of that recording. Transcription may also mean rewriting a piece of music, either solo or ensemble, for another instrument or other instruments than which it was originally intended. The Beethoven Symphonies by Franz Liszt are a good example. Transcription in this sense is sometimes called arrangement, although strictly speaking transcriptions are faithful adaptations, whereas arrangements change significant aspects of the original piece.
Tod Machover, is a composer and an innovator in the application of technology in music. He is the son of Wilma Machover, a pianist and Carl Machover, a computer scientist.
Music informatics is an emerging interdisciplinary research area dealing with the production, distribution, consumption, and analysis of music through technology.
An automixer, or automatic microphone mixer, is a live sound mixing device that automatically reduces the strength of a microphone's audio signal when it is not being used. Automixers lower the hiss, rumble, reverberation and other extraneous noise that occur when several microphones operate simultaneously.
Research in artificial intelligence (AI) is known to have impacted medical diagnosis, stock trading, robot control, and several other fields. Perhaps less popular is the contribution of AI in the field of music. Nevertheless, artificial intelligence and music (AIM) has, for a long time, been a common subject in several conferences and workshops, including the International Computer Music Conference, the Computing Society Conference and the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. In fact, the first International Computer Music Conference was the ICMC 1974, Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA
Current research includes the application of AI in music composition, performance, theory and digital sound processing.
Giuseppe Di Giugno is an Italian physicist. He graduated with a degree in physics from Rome University in 1961.
Lawrence Michael "Larry" Beauregard was a Canadian flautist. He is best known for his work as first flute in the Ensemble InterContemporain, and for his work at IRCAM in the early 1980s, especially his collaboration with Barry Vercoe on the Synthetic Performer project.
Antescofo is a program developed by Arshia Cont in 2007 at IRCAM in collaboration with composer Marco Stroppa to aid with the synchronization of electronics in live performances. It is a modular polyphonic Score Following system as well as a Synchronous Programming language for musical composition. Since 2012, Antescofo is being developed by a joint team between IRCAM and INRIA.
The International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) is an international forum for research on the organization of music-related data. It started as an informal group steered by an ad hoc committee in 2000 which established a yearly symposium - whence "ISMIR", which meant International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval. It was turned into a conference in 2002 while retaining the acronym. ISMIR was incorporated in Canada on July 4, 2008.
Music can be described and represented in many different ways including sheet music, symbolic representations, and audio recordings. For each of these representations, there may exist different versions that correspond to the same musical work. The general goal of music alignment is to automatically link the various data streams, thus interrelating the multiple information sets related to a given musical work. More precisely, music alignment is taken to mean a procedure which, for a given position in one representation of a piece of music, determines the corresponding position within another representation. In the figure on the right, such an alignment is visualized by the red bidirectional arrows. Such synchronization results form the basis for novel interfaces that allow users to access, search, and browse musical content in a convenient way.
