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21M.383 | Spring 2023 | Undergraduate, Graduate

# Computational Music Theory and Analysis

Video 6a: Music Representation (III): Unlocking Pitch in music21

This video describes how to unlock your first module in music21: pitch. All functions of the `pitch.Pitch` object will be unlocked except those with “transpose” in their name.

Video 6b: Representations of Ontologies: Craig Sapp’s Rosetta Stone

Representations of music are all different but similar. Craig Sapp’s “Rosetta Stone” helps to move between them.

Reading: Eleanor Selfridge-Field on “Describing Musical Information”

Read the following article to understand how music was (and mostly still is) represented by the computer:

Eleanor Selfridge-Field, “Describing Musical Information,” in Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes, (ed. Eleanor Selfridge-Field) MIT Press, 1997.

This article is about 25 years old, which is an eternity in computational anything! Someone needs to write something more up-to-date, but no one has because Eleanor Selfridge-Field, a superstar, does an exemplary job of conveying the basic problems in the field.

Discussion topics for Selfridge-Field reading:

- History of encoding
- The three contexts
- Events and features
- Music’s “Hello World” equivalences

Optional Reading: Donald Byrd on the “Extremes of Conventional Music Notation”

Donald Byrd, “Extremes of Conventional Music Notation,” (online resource, 2000(?)–2018).

We’ve talked in class twice about where Common Western Music Notation (CWMN), or as some say, Conventional Music Notation (CMN), moves into something else. Indiana University professor Donald Byrd has made a career of seeing where the lines break down and where assumptions and ontologies about what “Western music” is break down. If you’re interested in pushing these limits, read his list about the extremes of this notation.

Optional Reading: “Changing Musical Time”

In case you’re interested (just for fun), read the first five pages of this article, which gives a history of very long and very short musical durations and how music has slowed down over time. It’s from a tribute article (“Festschrift”) on the occasion of the retirement of a person named “Joe” (Joseph Connors, an art historian), in case the first paragraph makes no sense.

Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert, Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, Harvard University Press, 2013.

## Course Info

##### Instructor

- Prof. Michael Scott Asato Cuthbert

##### Departments

- Music and Theater Arts

##### As Taught In

Spring 2023

##### Level

Undergraduate
Graduate

##### Topics

- Fine Arts
  - Music
    - Music History
    - Music Theory
- Mathematics
  - Computation
  - Mathematical Analysis
  - Probability and Statistics

##### Learning Resource Types

notes Lecture Notes
theaters Lecture Videos
theaters Other Video
assignment Multiple Assignment Types
grading Exams
Editable Files

Browse Resources

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