Chapter 11: Musical Composition and Recomposition

Traditional musical analysis often focuses on the use of note-based musical scores. Since scores only exist for a small subset of the world's music, it is helpful to be able to analyze performances directly, to probe both the literal and the symbolic levels. This chapter uses the beat tracking of Chapter 8 to provide a skeletal tempo score that captures some of the salient aspects of the rhythm. By conducting analyses in a beat-synchronous manner, it is possible to track changes in a number of psychoacoustically significant musical variables. This allows the automatic extraction of new kinds of symbolic feature scores directly from the performances.

11.1  Accuracy of Performance     11.2  Beat Regularization     11.3  Beat-Synchronous Feature Scores     11.4  Julie's Waltz: An Analysis