The final step

At last it all seems to be working!!

I have launched the last experiment for my thesis, I ran a t-test and it gave me a nice p-value!

I don't want to publish results until I finish the experiment, but there are a lot of good news!!

Stay tuned and if you didn't do the experiment and you're a spanish speaker... what are you waiting for??

What is Cognitive Computational Music?

Since the first time I started this project, when someone asked me what was this about, I had to make an explanation of at least two sentences. It looked something like this:

"I have been reading a lot about music cognition. Then, using that cognitive theories I built statistical/generative models in the hope of getting interesting feedback to the original theories"

After some time passed, I started to reach a resumed version of that two sentences into only one sentence: the one you see at the top of this blog.

It is still to long as a short way to describe this project: It doesn't fit in a title like the one you see in this post =).

So now you know what Cognitive Computational Music is.

Lot of work

I lost my will to write here on the last months because I thought there were no great advances, however, I've realized it's not like that.

I've reached an experimental phase: I'm testing my models making people to rank them. The webpage is in spanish, it will be available in english soon. If you want to take a look here is a link: http://lacompositora.elsonidoq.com.ar.

The first experiment is finished and now I'm analyzing the data. One interesting thing, that also looks cool is a way I discovered to graph the probability distribution of a sucession of three notes (two melodic intervals) following Eugene Narmour's Implication-Realization theory.

He establishes some criteria on how we percieve melodic contours, and using that I made a probability distribution.

Within his theory he establishes that there are some criteria on how we organize the melodies. These criteria are cultural-independent, but also he says that breaking some of these rules have some cultural and aesthetic effects.

It's interesting how the probability distribution that my program learns when I serve as input different musical styles are kind of similar, but also different.

Here is one of Tom Jobin (A Felicidade), one of Scott Jopplin (Ellite Syncopations) and one of Beethoven (a dance) in that order. The Y axis indicate the length of the first interval, and the X axis indicates the length of the second interval.