MusICA Seminar: Simon Dixon - Measuring and Modelling Intonation and Temperament

Описание: MusICA Seminars: http://www.musica.ed.ac.uk

Speaker: Simon Dixon
Title: Measuring and Modelling Intonation and Temperament

More details at:
http://www.musica.ed.ac.uk/archive/20...

Pitch is perhaps the most important characteristic of musical sounds, being essential for determining both harmony and melody. Western music theory provides a framework for understanding pitch relationships in terms of intervals, scales and chords, expressed as a first approximation in indivisible units of semitones. Common music notation reflects this world-view. At the same time, it has been recognised since the time of Pythagoras that it is not possible for all theoretically consonant intervals to be perfectly “in tune”, and this has led to many theoretical and practical approaches to intonation, the realisation of pitch, in music performance.

In this seminar, I present two investigations of intonation in recorded music at two extremes of musical practice: a fixed-pitch instrument, the harpsichord, where the tuner determines the intonation of each pitch before the performance, and a variable-pitch instrument, the human voice, which can adjust the pitch of each note to the musical context and also vary the pitch over the note’s duration. In each case we have developed software tools for (semi-)automatic analysis of the pitch content of solo audio recordings.