Music as Language (2019) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Music as Language (2019) [pdf]

omelkonian.github.io

70 pointssargstuff17 comments

> Music composers have long been attracted by the idea of an automated tool for music generation, that is able to aid them in their day-to-day compositional process.

As an amateur composer I find this notion ridiculous. I love my DAW and all of its capabilities, but the compositional process itself is something I’ll never want to automate. That would defeat the purpose. I’d give long odds that if many composers were surveyed the percentage who want software to generate musical ideas for them would be close to zero.

Perhaps an argument can be made for things like instrumentation and arrangement, which was often outsourced to students even by the great composers. Writing out the score for a full symphony orchestra is very tedious, and quite repetitive within the conventions of the late 1800s.

But that’s about all I can think of. Just the availability of copy-paste appreciates 90% of that, I would imagine.

I'd argue that if you've never longed for automations, it's because you've never written a hard score. Any ambitious piece written at the churn pace that a composer needs to make a living - any such piece uses algorithmic tricks under the hood. There's human decision and judgment in using those, but it doesn't diminish their value - much less having them as automations.

this is provably false. the demand for generative compositional techniques fuels a lot of the Eurorack market. people pay lots of money for machines that generate musical ideas. and the history of algorithmic composition goes back to at least the 12th century. it’s niche, undeniably, but it’s not zero.

TidalCycles (https://tidalcycles.org/) is indeed written in Haskell - another take on 'music as language', though through live coding

Full disclosure: I'm the author of Glicol (https://glicol.org/)

TidalCycles has an in-browser version now: https://strudel.cc/

Not related to this paper but you may find the Solresol constructed language interesting:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol

Also call and response ("a succession of two distinct phrases that works like a conversation in music") is a basic building block for pretty much every popular song ever.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_and_response_(music)

i think the big blind spot most research like this has is that they focus on the abstractions on music- "harmony" in particular. music becomes so much more interesting when you realize the practicalities of the instruments, coordination of musicians and circumstances of listening etc drive the music as much as anything. the music encodes all this. notice how different genres have different instruments, different band sizes, different performance customs, different societal status, different harmony, melody, rhythm, texture etc? focusing on harmony is fun, but its over analyzed because its math bait

I have a strong hunch that music has a profound emotional effect because we can use the same kind of signal decomposition to encode both emotionality and musicality. Of course, I have no evidence for my claim.

This is a hypothesis put forward by Gerald Langner in the last chapter of “The Neural Code of Pitch and Harmony” 2015. I personally think he was on to something but sadly he died in 2016 before he could promote the work

I'm working at a research lab where we are designing assistive musical instruments for disabled musicians. A couple projects involve building guitars that can be played one handed, and have all the chord changes handled by transposing/muting the 6 open notes played on the strings according to guitar tabs which encode finger positions on the fret board.

I don't play guitar, and all my background music theory is primarily keyboard based. Learning about guitar tabs, and finger positions and techniques, a lot about guitar based music makes much more sense, and if you even just look at the data behind guitar tabs is smells like it's own dialect of music.

Take a look at this chords database. https://tombatossals.github.io/react-chords/

That's just chords, the dynamics are a whole other dimension of expression and communication. A single note with expressive control can communicate a lot.

And then rhythm! A game my daughter and I play is to name that song just by clapping it.

The bandwidth of communication in music is really quite astounding.

It is the original virtual reality.

Use this as a basis to understand dolphin and whale communication!

So... how does one say, "One beer, please" in music?

Incidentally the reason people who actually know the first thing about either music or linguistics would never call it a language, and definitely not a “universal” language.

It’s not universal, and it’s not a language, for any reasonable definition of either word.

The Stormlight Archive’s would like to have a word

I speak, english, bad english,and guitar.

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