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The Center for Studies in Music Technology at Yale Research Abstract
Visual morphing has become a popular device in television, film and software. At least one attempt to create an aural analogy to visual morphing has been done by attempting to build transitions at the acoustic signal level [Penrose,1994]. Polanski [Polanski 1987, 1989, 1991] has formulated a generative theory which creates morphological transformations at any level of structure and applied to any parameter. Our approach differs radically from their work in that we search for a pattern relationship in which salience (that is a recognizable feature of the music) serves as the material that undergoes transformation.
The use of musical puns and pattern connections at a high level of musical structure has been a popular technique among composers and performing musicians for centuries. We have been investigating a method of cross breeding musical types and a means of automatically generating transitions between two musical segments. Our goal was not to outdo the masters of musical morphs but to try to understand and model the method of arriving at morphological connections and of building transitions between these connections.
Our method involved passing a score through a pattern recognition algorithm, classifying detected patterns according to rules of salience and matching these patterns with others in order to find various types of relationships. Each aspect of this task is discussed in detail below.
Due to research funding sources our goal was to write a commercial product with enough specificity to run with no user intervention. However throughout the project we retained a high degree of generality in our methods such that the tools developed remain powerful analytical devices applicable to any types of music in which pitch and/or rhythmic patterns are important dimensions.
Coming soon: Examples of morphs: (MIDI files)
Jonathan Berger
Comments to author: jberger@csmt.music.yale.edu
All contents copyright (C) 1995. Yale Center for Studies in Music Technology. All rights reserved. Revised: June 1, 1995