Fabrice Marandola

Measuring Similarity between Flamenco Rhythmic Patterns

Abstract Music similarity underlies a large part of a listeners experience, as it relates to familiarity and associations between different pieces or parts. Rhythmic similarity has received scant research attention in comparison with other aspects of music similarity such as melody or harmony. Mathematical measures of rhythmic similarity have been proposed, but none of them has been compared to human judgments. We present a first study consisting of two listening tests conducted to compare two mathematical similarity measures, the chronotonic distance and the directed swap distance, to perceptual measures of similarity. In order to investigate the effect of expertise on the perception of rhythmic similarity, we contrasted three groups of participants, namely non-musicians, classically trained percussionists and flamenco musicians. Results are presented in terms of statistical analysis of the raw ratings, phylogenetic analysis of the dissimilarity matrices, correlation with mathematical measures and qualitative analysis of spontaneous verbal descriptions reported by participants. A main effect of expertise was observed on the raw ratings, but not on the dissimilarity matrices. No effect of tempo was observed. Results of both listening tests converge to show that the directed-swap distance best matches human judgments of similarity regardless of expertise. The analysis of verbal descriptions indicates that novice listeners focused on ‘surface’ features, while musicians focused on the underlying rhythmic structure and used more specialized vocabulary.

Virtual gesture control and synthesis of music performances: Qualitative evaluation of synthesized timpani exercises

The increasing availability of software for creating real-time simulations of musical instrument sounds allows for the design of new visual and sounding media. These past decades have especially focused on the control of real and virtual instruments by natural gestures. In this paper, we present and extensively evaluate a framework (Figure 1) for the control of virtual percussion instruments, by modeling and simulating virtual percussionists gestures. By positioning the virtual performer at the center of the gesture-sound synthesis system, we aim at providing original tools to analyze and synthesize instrumental gesture performances. Our physics-based approach for gesture simulation brings some insight into the effect of biomechanical parameters of the gesture on the instrumental performance. Simulating both gesture and sound by physical models leads also to a coherent and human-centered interaction and provides new ways of exploring the mapping between gesture and sound. The use of motion capture data enables the realistic synthesis of both pre-recorded and novel percussion sequences from the specification of gesture scores. Such scores involve motion editing techniques applied to simple beat attacks. We therefore propose an original gesture language based on the instrumental playing techniques. This language is characterized by expressivity, interactivity with the user, and the possibility to take into account co-articulation between gesture units. Finally, providing 3D visual rendering synchronized with sound rendering allows us to observe virtual performances to the light of real ones, and to qualitatively evaluate both pedagogical and compositional capabilities of such a system.

The Study of Musical Scales in Central Africa: The Use of Interactive Experimental Methods

In the oral traditional cultures of Central Africa, the rules which underline the musical system are rarely verbalised: abstract concepts like “scale”, “degree” or “interval”, are not just non-verbalised, they are practically unverbalisable. Thus the study of musical scales requires the use of interactive experimental methods. For two years, a research-team leaded by Simha Arom (in collaboration with acousticians of Ircam-Paris) studies the untempered scales used by the Bedzan Pygmies in their contrapuntal songs and the Ouldeme in their hocket instrumental polyphony. The principle of the methods that we have developed is to make the musicians actors in the experiment, able to react immediately to the proposals of the investigators and to provide modifications of them, directly or indirectly.

Quantitative Evaluation of Percussive Gestures by Ranking Trainees versus Teacher

In this paper we characterize timpani gestures by temporal kinematic features, containing most information responsible for the sound-producing actions. In order to evaluate the feature sets, a classification approach is conducted under three main attack categories (legato, accent and vertical accent) and sub-categories (dynamics, striking position). Two studies are carried out: intra-subject and inter-subjects classification. Results are presented in terms of a quantitative ranking of students, using professional gestures as training set, and their gestures as test set.

Handedness in Percussion Sight-Reading

This paper presents the findings of a study investigating the effects of handedness on percussionists. Handedness, which is a subcategory of the field of laterality, has a number of wide-ranging effects on human movement. Previous research has shown that more attention is diverted to the preferred-hand when the level of difficulty is increased in a given task. Furthermore, the preferred hand is relied upon to initiate a timing schedule for bimanual tapping tasks. Given the strong connection between performance-based tapping tasks and percussion performance, this study sought to test the aforementioned findings in the context of instrumental performance. In the current literature, little to no research exists on the subject of handedness in percussive performance. With the assistance of 7 right-handed and 2 left-handed participants, the effects of handedness were observed in a motion capture facility. The participants performed a single-page sight-reading exercise. Each participant had at least one year of undergraduate training in percussion performance. The tasks were performed on a 29-inch timpani drum. The sight-reading exercise was written to specifically challenge the participants with regards to handedness. Here, the exercise gradually changed in rhythmic complexity, using irregular and syncopated rhythm structures to complicate the participants internal timing. The findings of this study revealed a sharp shift in the use of the preferred and non-preferred hands in relation to beat structure. Larger beat structures, such as down-beats, commanded 84.1% usage of the preferred-hand while 16th-note subdivisions reported just 32.0%. Further observations and analysis show that the obfuscation of the down-beat with irregular rhythms disrupt the participants timing causing a series of multi-strokes with the preferred-hand.