Automatic Musical Accompaniment Systems

Program notes: Eurydice is an automatic music accompaniment system useful in exercises, rehearsals and personal enjoyment of concerto, chamber music, 4-hand piano pieces, and left/right hand filled in to one-hand performances. The system can handle performance mistakes as well as arbitrary repeats and skips between any pionts in the piece, which amateur musicians may make during playing music. In Eurydice for MIDI input, polyphonic performances played with digital piano, etc. can be accompanied, and trills, grace notes, arpeggio are also treated. Another version of Eurydice accepts audio signal input and accompanies to it. Our video examples include some classical works for piano played with digital piano and piano accompanied sonatas for acoustic clarinet.

Program notes: "'Round Midnight" by Thelonius Monk, performed by Roger Dannenberg, is a classic jazz standard. This performance commemorates Dannenberg's first presentation of computer accompaniment 3 decades ago at the 1984 International Computer Music Conference, where he performed the same tune using an 8-bit microprocessor with special hardware support for F0 detection and sound synthesis. The arrangement for today's performance is provided by Arshia Cont, and the software is Antescofo. Although this is a jazz standard, the performance will be played without improvisation to allow score following techniques to synchronize the accompaniment.

Program notes: Plato wrote some of the earliest treatises on music, proposing a way of thinking about music based upon proportions and geometric ratios. Plato thought about music in the ideal sense as abstract and mathematically perfect, whereas I think that actual music lies somewhere between the pure rationality of pattern and grounded, physical, emotional experience. This piece was motivated by unfinished business from a class I taught on audio signal processing in Fall 2012. In that class, a student asked me a question about whether overtones could be played in the same way that notes are. (Although we consciously play notes, there are many resonances above the fundamental note that we unconsciously also create.) At the time, I didn't have a satisfying answer to the question of how you might purposefully play (and play with) harmonics. That question captured my imagination, and I have attempted to answer it with this piece.

http://www.tcnj.edu/~nakra/creativework.html

Program notes: This work is the second in a series of pieces written in memory of computer scientist John Reynolds. Prof. Reynolds played a key role in the development of Separation Logic, a new logic for reasoning about concurrent programs. Other than being highly concurrent and sharing the name, Separation Logic for Trumpet and Computer has no direct relationship with the logic. However, the title evokes interesting new perspectives in this artistic context. I will leave it to the listener to think about how "separation" and "logic" apply to this work. Separation Logic uses real-time recording and playback along with signal processing to augment the acoustic trumpet with a dense world of additional sounds. The software Antescofo is used to follow the real-time performance and give cues to start, stop and modify signal processing operations as the piece progresses.

Program notes: Christopher Raphael, the inventor of Music-Plus-One, performing Siciliana from Handel oboe concerto #8 on Oboe.

Program notes: Nick Kitchen (violin faculty at New England Conservatory) playing violin with Music+1 on a movement from the Brahms Violin Concerto and an excerpt from the Mozart Concerto 5.