Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Melodic structure'

Klangfarbenmelodien is a term first mentioned by Schoenberg in his Harmonielehre (1911) in a discussion suggesting the idea of tone colors as a structural element equal to other musical components such as harmony, rhythm, pitch, and dynamics. The intent of this study is to investigate significant influences that led to Webern's adoption and application of Klangrfarben techniques in the Symphony, op. 21, first movement. Webern's expression of Klangfarbenmelodien was his method of dispersing melodic lines and the manipulation of a wide gamut of varying tone colors. A brief biography is included in the paper and Webern's professional career as a conductor is viewed and considered as to its affect on the creation of the Symphony with emphasis on his relationship with Schoenberg and the Society for Private Musical Performance. The genesis of the Symphony and its early performance history is examined, as well as the structure of op. 21 with specific examples of Klangrfarbenmelodien. These techniques include the presentation of melodic lines in terms of octave register, timbre, dynamics, articulation, durations, rhythm, and instrumentation.

Il est raisonnable de considérer qu'un auditeur ne perçoit pas la musique comme une simple séquence de sons, pas plus que le compositeur n'a conçu son morceau comme tel. La musique est en effet constituée de motifs dont l'organisation intrinsèque et les relations mutuelles participent à la structuration du propos musical, et ce à plusieurs échelles simultanément. Cependant, il est aujourd'hui encore très difficile de définir précisément le terme de concept musicale. L'un des principaux aspects de la musique est qu'elle est en grande partie constituée de redondances, sous forme de répétitions exactes et variées. L'organisation de ces redondances permet de susciter une attente chez l'auditeur. Une surprise peut alors être créée en présentant des éléments qui ne correspondent pas à cette attente. Ce travail de thèse se base sur l'hypothèse que les redondances, l'attente et la surprise sont des éléments essentiels pour la description de la structure musicale d'un segment. Un certain nombre de questions découlent de ce constat: quels sont les éléments musicaux qui participent à la structure d'un objet musical ? Quelles sont les dépendances entre ces éléments qui jouent un rôle essentiel dans la structuration d'un objet musical ? Comment peut-on décrire une relation entre deux éléments musicaux tels que des accords, des motifs rythmiques ou mélodiques ? Dans ce manuscrit, des éléments de réponse sont proposés par la formalisation et l'implémentation d'un modèle multi-échelle de description de la structure d'un segment musical : les Graphes Polytopiques à Relations Latentes (GPRL/PGLR). Dans ce travail, les segments considérés sont les sections successives qui forment une pièce musicale. Dans le cas de la pop, genre musical sur lequel se concentre ce travail, il s'agit typiquement d'un couplet ou d'un refrain, de 15 sec. environ, comprenant un début et une fin bien définis. En suivant le formalisme PGLR, les relations de dépendance prédominantes entre éléments musicaux d'un segment sont celles qui relient les éléments situés à des positions homologues sur la grille métrique du segment. Cette approche généralise sur le plan multi-échelle le modèle Système&amp;Contraste qui décrit sous la forme d'une matrice 2×2 le système d'attente logique au sein d'un segment et la surprise qui découle de la réalisation de cette attente. Pour des segments réguliers de taille 2^n, le PGLR peut être représenté sur un n-cube (carré, cube, tesseract, ...), où n est le nombre d'échelles considérées. Chaque nœud du polytope correspond à un élément musical fondamental (accord, motif, note...), chaque arête représente une relation entre deux nœuds et chaque face représente un système de relations. La recherche du PGLR correspondant à la meilleure description de la structure d'un segment musical s'opère par l'estimation jointe : de la description du polytope (un n-polytope plus ou moins régulier) ; de la configuration du graphe sur le polytope, permettant de décrire le flux de dépendance et les interactions entre les éléments par des implications élémentaires systémiques au sein du segment ; la description de l'ensemble des relations entre les nœuds du graphe. Le but du modèle PGLR est à la fois de décrire les dépendances temporelles entre les éléments d'un segment et de modéliser l'attente logique et la surprise qui découlent de l'observation et de la perception des similarités et des différences entre ces éléments. Cette approche a été formalisée et implémentée pour décrire la structure de séquences d'accords ainsi que de segments rythmiques et mélodiques, puis évaluée par sa capacité à prédire des segments inconnus. La mesure utilisée pour cette évaluation est la perplexité croisée calculée à partir des données du corpus RWC POP. Les résultats obtenus donnent un large avantage à la méthode multi-échelle proposée, qui semble mieux à même de décrire efficacement la structure des segments testés<br>In this thesis, we approach these questions by defining and implementing a multi-scale model for music segment structure description, called Polytopic Graph of Latent Relations (PGLR). In our work, a segment is the macroscopic constituent of the global piece. In pop songs, which is the main focus here, segments usually correspond to a chorus or a verse, lasting approximately 15 seconds and exhibiting a clear beginning and end. Under the PGLR scheme, relationships between musical elements within a musical segment are assumed to be developing predominantly between homologous elements within the metrical grid at different scales simultaneously. This approach generalises to the multi-scale case the System&amp;Contrast framework which aims at describing, as a 2×2 square matrix, the logical system of expectation within a segment and the surprise resulting from that expectation. For regular segments of 2^n events, the PGLR lives on a n-dimensional cube (square, cube, tesseract, etc...), n being the number of scales considered simultaneously in the multi-scale model. Each vertex in the polytope corresponds to a low-scale musical element, each edge represents a relationship between two vertices and each face forms an elementary system of relationships. The estimation of the PGLR structure of a musical segment can then be obtained computationally as the joint estimation of : the description of the polytope (as a more or less regular n-polytope) ; the nesting configuration of the graph over the polytope, reflecting the flow of dependencies and interactions as elementary implication systems within the musical segment, the set of relations between the nodes of the graph. The aim of the PGLR model is to both describe the time dependencies between the elements of a segment and model the logical expectation and surprise that can be built on the observation and perception of the similarities and differences between elements with strong relationships. The approach is presented conceptually and algorithmically, together with an extensive evaluation of the ability of different models to predict unseen data, measured using the cross-perplexity value. These experiments have been conducted both on chords sequences, rhythmic and melodic segments extracted from the RWC POP corpus. Our results illustrate the efficiency of the proposed model in capturing structural information within such data

The octatonic pitch set can be found in the works of many composers since the early nineteenth century, often with different characteristics of the pitch set being exploited by the composers. Much of the literature on octatonicism relates to specific instances in compositions or a specific composer’s approach to it rather than exploring octatonicism from a more holistic perspective. This dissertation serves as a holistic resource for the characteristics of the octatonic pitch set; whether as a scale, especially with regards to common practice harmony; or an unordered set. It does this by considering the contextual historical implications of the octatonic pitch set; the historic lineage of octatonic usage; and, significantly, with the goal of extracting specific compositional devices from the works of various composers that come from a variety of stylistic, historical, and harmonic perspectives. These compositional devices are learnable methods, or conventions that a composer can modify, build upon or implement into their own work. The contextual historical information, along with the description of the characteristics of the octatonic pitch set and, especially, the compositional devices are all intended to be both a single pedagogical resource and starting point for composers in relation to developing new octatonic compositional techniques and a holistic theoretical overview of octatonicism. The evidence, retrieved from third party analysis of select composers’ octatonic works, finds learnable compositional devices from broad stylistic backgrounds that can be reinterpreted and expanded into individualised compositional methods.

This dissertation is in two unrelated parts: the first part is the Dissertation Essay (p. 1-49) and the second part is the Dissertation Composition (p. 50-178). The Dissertation Essay is an analysis of György Ligeti's Étude 1: Désordre (Disorder) (1985) for piano. In the first part of the essay, there is a short introduction to Ligeti's Piano Etudes, quotations by him, and basic information about the Désordre. In the second part the etude's melodic lines are discussed, with help of figures of the phrases of the melodic lines. The main focus of the composition is in rhythm, which is given consideration in the third and most extensive part. The rhythm is approached from a perspective of different rhythmic levels, also with the help of figures. Finally in the fourth, shifting and form are scrutinized. The last part is followed by Conclusions, Bibliography / Works Cited, and Appendix (Analysis sheets of Désordre). In the analysis sheets of Désordre (Appendix) the etude is approached from the points of view of rhythmic levels of two individual lines, phrasings of these melodic lines, shifting of bar lines (between right and left hands) and overall form. Throughout this essay it is recommended that one follows Appendix. Désordre is a refined combination of systematic and non-systematic music. Ligeti bends, changes and breaks the system along the way. The fine balancing between the order and disorder, is a core idea of the composition. The Dissertation Composition is Velinikka, Concerto for Quarter-tone Accordion and Chamber Orchestra (2008). The composition was commissioned by Gaudeamus Music Week and is dedicated to Veli Kujala. Velinikka, 25-minute work, was premiered on September 1st, 2008 by Veli Kujala, quarter-tone accordion, and Insomnio conducted by Ulrich Pöhl at Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam. The cadenza of the concerto is improvised or/and composed by the soloist. Cooperation between Veli Kujala and the undersigned has led to an elaboration of a new instrument, the quarter-tone accordion. The most significant difference between the quarter-tone accordion and a standard chromatic button accordion with free-bass system is that the reed blocks inside the accordion are replaced with quarter-tone reed blocks. The quarter-tone reed blocks are able to produce a complete quarter-tone scale of nearly five-octave range. The quarter-tone accordion was invented by Veli Kujala in 2004. The quarter-tone reed blocks were designed by Veli Kujala and built by Pigini, an accordion factory in Italy, in 2006. The tuning system used is quarter-tone equal temperament, in which the scale divides an octave into 24 equal-ratio steps. Today many composers are interested in using micro-intervals. This increases demand for instruments able to produce them. The quarter-tone accordion is one of the answers for this demand.

Inspired by Lin and Huang’s (2009) rhythmic study of Chinese dialects, this study examines speech rhythm of 21 Chinese dialects from three perspectives, timing, melody, and phonological structure. The 21 dialects belong to four major groups of Chinese and their respective sub-groups. The four major groups are Mandarin, Wu, Min, and Cantonese. Nine duration-based and four pitch-based metrics are used to quantify timing and melody, respectively. Four phonological structure-based metrics are used to explore the relationships between syllable structure and timing and between tone structure and melody. All the metrics are paired up according to five categories, duration-only, pitch-only, duration-pitch, duration-syllable, pitch-tone, and each pair is subject to a correlation analysis. Then timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are determined by correlation patterns of relevant metric pairs. The main findings of this study are as follows: 1) Timing and melody patterns of the Chinese dialects are far from homogenous across major groups and melody patterns are more distinct than timing patterns; 2) No single metric pair is able to quantify speech rhythm consistently for all the Chinese dialects; nonetheless, pitch-based metric pairs fare better than duration-based ones; 3) Syllable-timedness and melodiousness are correlated positively for all the major groups except for Wu; 4) Phonological structure plays little role in shaping timing and melody patterns of most Chinese dialects. The above findings are both expected and unexpected. They are expected in the sense that rhythmic perception invovles multiple acoustic cues, so it comes as no surprise that not all rhythmic metrics are successful in quantifying Chinese rhythm. They are unexpected for the reason that all the metrics are developed based more or less on phonological structure, yet the rhythmic patterns they reveal do not correspond to the structure affinity or group membership of the Chinese dialects. Overall, the findings suggest that pitch is a more import cue than duration to Chinese rhythm. As the first study of Chinese rhythm across multiple dialects and from different perspectives, this study not only lays a methodological foundation for future research but also contributes to our in-depth understanding of Chinese dialects.<br>Graduate<br>0290<br>yali@uvic.ca

博士<br>國立臺灣大學<br>資訊工程學研究所<br>103<br>There is no definite meaning for music complexity. Current work studied it in terms of complexity of music structure, extending previous research on the complexity of rhythmic structure only. Melody and rhythm this time both encoded within binary tree and the assessment on structural properties of the tree performed. This is the key difference with other studies where complexity assessments performed on music components independently. The concepts of rewriting and L-Systems used to extract repeatable patterns from the tree and form tree generating context-sensitive grammar. Elementary notes transition represented as grammar’s rewriting rules. Rewriting rules classification transforms context-sensitive grammars to context-free stochastic variant. More complex tree has more complex generating grammar, the final assessment score is well-known complexity (or entropy) of context-free grammar. Current work updated the method with new binary tree. Redefined tree is capable to store arbitrary content inside the nodes, thus encoding dissimilar features such as melody and rhythm within its structure and nodes simultaneously. Notions of similarity for rewriting rules were updated accordingly. Better algorithm for rewriting rules classification was proposed and approbated during the study. Finally, minor theoretical conform issues of notations were accurately justified. Updated method was approbated with two datasets: drums exercises and Barlow dictionary of 10,000 classical themes. Empirical results revealed enough method sensitivity to detect atypical samples within the corpus, discriminate samples by their relative complexity and score the comprehensiveness of particular musical or personal style.

Black choral music composers in South Africa, inspired by the few opportunities available to them until recent times, have nonetheless attempted to establish, perhaps subconsciously, some choral tradition and, in doing so, incorporate African musical elements in their works. My research traces the foundations and historical development of choral music as an art amongst Vhavenda, and the contributions made thereto by a number of past and present Venda composers that this researcher could manage to identify and trace, to the music of the people. The selected composers are Stephen Maimela Dzivhani, Matthew Ramboho Nemakhavhani, Derrick Victor Nephawe, Joseph Khorommbi Nonge, Israel Thinawanga Ramabannda and Fhatuwani Hamilton Sumbana. Through the application of multiple methodological lenses, the study sets out to analyse, describe, and interpret Venda choral music. Of particular interest is the exploration of the extent to which the ”formal” education that was brought by the Berlin Missionaries influenced Venda choral musicians, particularly the selected Venda choral music composers. Also crucial to this research is the exploration and identification of elements peculiar to indigenous Venda traditional music in the works of these composers. The question is whether it was possible for these composers to realize and utilize their potentials fully in their attempt to evoke traditional Venda music with their works, given the very limiting Western tonic sol-fa notational system they were solely working with. The project also briefly traces the place of Venda choral music within the South African music context and its role within the search for cultural identity. The research has found that the majority of Venda choral music written so far has generally not been capable of evoking indigenous Venda traditional music. Whilst these composers choose themes that are akin to their culture, social settings, legend and general communal life, the majority of the music they set to these themes does not sound African (Venda in particular) in terms of the rhythms and melodies. The majority of the compositions under scrutiny have inappropriate settings of Venda words into the melodies employed. This can be attributed to the limitations imposed by the tonic sol-fa notational system, which was the only system they were taught in the missionary schools established around Venda and which, itself, was flawed as well as the general lack of adequate music education on the part of the composers themselves. Despite these limitations and the very few opportunities available to them, Venda choral music composers nonetheless managed to lay a foundation for choral music as an art amongst their people (Vhavenda).<br>Art history, Visual Ars and Musicology<br>D. Mus