These kind of posts will be just an attempt to publish my understanding and thoughts on the topics I read as a part of my research.
Currently I am reading the book "Generative theory of Tonal Music", In this work the writer tries to come up with the formal theory of music. According to him a musical theory will be like an algorithm which will generate new musical pieces. I like this idea. Till now not many people think that music could be purely mathematical as is the case for linguistics. In liguistics the grammar is an algorithm which generates different sentences , imagine if we can come up with such a set of rules for music which can be used to generate new sentences. It seems pretty obvious to me that for music composers these kind of rules subconsciously exist in their mind and hence it becomes very simple for them to come up with new compositions. Its like a child learning a language. Once he learns all the rules of the language he can generate new sentences on his own.
One of the most important points I read today was that how to relate the musical grammer or structure of a musical peice to the emotions of a listener. What I personally think is that a same musical piece will invoke same kind of emotions in everybody. Consider an EDM track, usually I feel pumped up after hearing such tracks, and I think everybody would feel the same. Usually fast beats make you feel excited. Again I think we can come up with some kind of mathematical theory which can map a musical piece with an emotion without the involvement of a human. If we go at a deeper level, emotions are nothing but a set of neurons being activated in our mind. Its like a billion or trillion 'or' and 'and' gates in our minds .How great it would be if a computer can listen to a song and can decide if it is sad or happy one. But this is very early to say that we can come up with such a theory or not. I am still on the first chapter of this book.
Currently I am reading the book "Generative theory of Tonal Music", In this work the writer tries to come up with the formal theory of music. According to him a musical theory will be like an algorithm which will generate new musical pieces. I like this idea. Till now not many people think that music could be purely mathematical as is the case for linguistics. In liguistics the grammar is an algorithm which generates different sentences , imagine if we can come up with such a set of rules for music which can be used to generate new sentences. It seems pretty obvious to me that for music composers these kind of rules subconsciously exist in their mind and hence it becomes very simple for them to come up with new compositions. Its like a child learning a language. Once he learns all the rules of the language he can generate new sentences on his own.
One of the most important points I read today was that how to relate the musical grammer or structure of a musical peice to the emotions of a listener. What I personally think is that a same musical piece will invoke same kind of emotions in everybody. Consider an EDM track, usually I feel pumped up after hearing such tracks, and I think everybody would feel the same. Usually fast beats make you feel excited. Again I think we can come up with some kind of mathematical theory which can map a musical piece with an emotion without the involvement of a human. If we go at a deeper level, emotions are nothing but a set of neurons being activated in our mind. Its like a billion or trillion 'or' and 'and' gates in our minds .How great it would be if a computer can listen to a song and can decide if it is sad or happy one. But this is very early to say that we can come up with such a theory or not. I am still on the first chapter of this book.
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ReplyDeleteAn interesting thought I must say. What I get from this is that you tend to extract sentiments from lyrics of a song ?
ReplyDeleteExtracting sentiments from the lyrics of the song would be a job of linguistics. What I was trying to mention was to extract sentiments from a melody itself. I think you must have experienced yourself that some melodies give a positive feeling or any paticular type of feeling, so we can use this musical grammar to know what kind of feelind does that melody correspond to. For example: Using the rules of english grammar you can say that if a sentence contains a "why", "what" or an "how" it will most probably a question. Similarly using the rules of musical grammar if we can know what kind of feeling that melody would deliver wouldn't that be great?
DeleteYou mean to say that by analysing the digital signals, you want to extract the feeling contained in it ?
DeleteI had one more question ? Aren't feelings like that relative, what melody might seem to be positive to you at any particular moment may be just normal for me at another instant
Yes Vaibhav you are right, these feelings are subjective and not objective.
DeleteOne approach to solve this problem can be a survey to rate the tunes we feed in for the machine learning process and maybe use support vector machines for that purpose. For eg: A song may have its sadness score and a happiness score to name a few of the dimensions in the vector of each melody.