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About This Issue This issue’s cover theme, “Robot scribes results of an experiment to can yield a sonic collage whose tem- Musicians,” concerns a longstanding evaluate how well the robot emulates poral evolution imitates that of the but frequently overlooked area of a human performance. original. Audio examples, including computer music. The cover of Com- The other article on this theme, by excerpts of a composition by the au- puter Music Journal Vol. 10, Number Gil Weinberg and Scott Driscoll, fo- thor, can be heard on the DVD (and 1 (Spring 1986) displayed an early cuses less on elaborate mechanics more can be found at his Web site). musical robot, the Sumitomo imple- and more on musicianship: Their ro- Our Fall 2005 issue presented an mentation of the WABOT-2 (dis- bot plays a simpler instrument, a article about a visual sound-synthesis cussed further in CMJ 10:2). That drum, but it can improvise based on language called PWGLSynth. keyboard-playing robot, replete with what it hears a human percussionist PWGLSynth is part of a more general a conversation system and a video playing. The robot, named Haile, in- visual environment, PWGL, written camera for optical recognition of teracts with human musicians in six in Lisp. Another component of sheet music, issued from an exten- different modes: imitation, stochastic PWGL, called Expressive Notation sive development project at Waseda transformation, perceptual transfor- Package (ENP), provides a “front University in Tokyo. In more recent mation, beat detection, simple ac- end” in terms of music notation. years, researchers at Waseda have cre- companiment, and perceptual (ENP was mentioned in last year’s ar- ated successively improved versions accompaniment. After describing the ticle, and an example of its use can be of a robot flutist. Like the WABOT-2, robot’s design, the authors discuss seen on the cover of that issue.) In the this robot flutist, which is called the two compositions written for Haile present issue, Mika Kuuskankare WF-4II in its current incarnation, is plus human percussionists, followed elaborates upon the concepts and ca- anthropomorphic in design and func- by a report on musicians’ experiences pabilities of ENP. In general, ENP of- tion: It mimics not just the superfi- of playing with the robot. The article fers deep access to its notational cial appearance of a human, but also concludes with a look to the future of objects, whereas some notation soft- the requisite body parts for flute play- robot musicianship. The DVD that ware tends to treat objects on a more ing (lungs, lips, fingers, etc.). In this accompanies this issue includes superficial, graphical level. For ex- issue, Jorge Solis, Atsuo Takanishi, videos of both the WF-4II and Haile ample, ENP’s scores can be generated and their colleagues at Waseda dis- in action. algorithmically; scores can be auto- cuss the evolution and current design Bob Sturm’s article describes his matically analyzed and annotated; of the robot flutist. To prepare a par- implementation and exploration of custom expression markings can ticular piece for performance, a automated micromontage. His soft- change their appearance dynamically MIDI file of the composition is ana- ware for adaptive concatenative according to the musical context; and lyzed along with an audio recording sound synthesis (ACSS) uses a pre- scores written in the optional propor- of a professional human flutist’s ren- existing sound as a template. A tional (non-mensural) notation can dition of the piece, and control data frame-based analysis of this sound have their notes dragged to any posi- for the robot are generated. The produces feature vectors that are then tion in time, with expression mark- robot then performs the solo part used to retrieve similar frames from a ings following along (instead of a while a MIDI synthesizer plays the large database of sounds. The con- fundamentally metric approach that accompaniment. The article de- catenation of these retrieved snippets simply hides the bar lines). Front cover. The two musical ro- Back cover. To generate this anno- nected triangles, circles, and squares bots discussed in this issue: WF-4II tated score excerpt, the Expressive to indicate music-theoretical rela- (left) and Haile (right). Notation Package automatically ana- tionships. See the article by Mika lyzed the music and added the con- Kuuskankare for more information. About This Issue 1 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2006.30.4.1 by guest on 26 September 2021 This issue’s final article, by Rui tion and noise reduction, and a music former Editor of the Journal, who Pedro Paiva et al., describes a pro- theorist’s book on the perceptual possesses many of the lacquer mas- gram for extracting the melody notes foundations of meter. ters and who facilitated the transfer from an audio recording having both Longtime readers of the Journal of the analog recordings to digital au- a melody and a chordal or polyphonic may recall the vinyl soundsheets that dio expressly for this DVD. James accompaniment. The sequence of op- were bound into an issue approxi- Harley produced the DVD. erations consists of: multi-pitch de- mately annually. Like the later an- The DVD also contains, as scanned tection at the level of 46-msec nual CDs or DVDs, these flimsy images embedded in PDF files, not frames, determination of notes by phonograph records provided a means only the original program notes for constructing and segmenting pitch to disseminate compositions and these soundsheets, but also various trajectories, elimination of “ghost oc- sound examples that augmented the feature articles that corresponded to tave notes,” selection of the most Journal’s articles. All the issues con- the tracks. In addition to this histori- salient notes, resolution of temporal taining soundsheets have long been cal material, the DVD includes video overlaps between notes, handling of out of print, and that collection of au- and audio, playable on standalone abrupt changes of register, removal of dio has never before been available in DVD players, to accompany nine cur- accompaniment notes (remaining digital form, except for the tracks rent or recent articles, such as the less-salient or too-short notes), and from Volumes 15–18, which were previous issue’s interview with com- restoration of previously truncated reissued on the Volume 19 CD. We poser Francis Dhomont. Finally, the notes. The authors present their algo- are therefore delighted to announce, DVD-ROM part of the disc includes rithms and then show experimental in celebration of 30 years of Com- the pDM software by Anders Friberg results that evaluate their system in puter Music Journal, that the DVD that was discussed in the Spring is- comparison to others. accompanying this issue includes a sue. For further information, see the The reviews in this issue critique re-release of all the heretofore un- DVD Program Notes near the back of various recent compact discs, two available soundsheet material. We this issue. software packages for audio restora- appreciate the help of Curtis Roads, 2 Computer Music Journal Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2006.30.4.1 by guest on 26 September 2021 Computer Music Journal Volume 30, Number 4 Winter 2006 Contents About This Issue 1 Announcements 5 News 8 Musical Robotics The Waseda Flutist Robot WF-4RII in Comparison with a Professional Flutist Jorge Solis, Keisuke Chida, Koichi Taniguchi, Shinichiro Michael Hashimoto, Kei Suefuji, and Atsuo Takanishi 12 Toward Robotic Musicianship Gil Weinberg and Scott Driscoll 28 Sound Processing and Composition Adaptive Concatenative Sound Synthesis and Its Application to Micromontage Composition Bob L. Sturm 46 Music Notation and Representation Expressive Notation Package Mika Kuuskankare and Mikael Laurson 67 Music Information Retrieval Melody Detection in Polyphonic Musical Signals: Exploiting Perceptual Rules, Note Salience, and Melodic Smoothness Rui Pedro Paiva, Teresa Mendes, and Amílcar Cardoso 80 Reviews Publications 99 Justin London: Hearing in Time: Psychological Aspects of Musical Meter John Ashley Burgoyne 99 Recordings 100 Mario Davidovsky: Flashbacks The Music of Mario Davidovsky, Volume 3 alcides lanza 100 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2006.30.4.1 by guest on 26 September 2021 25e Concours International de Musique Electroacoustique, Bourges: Prix Quadrivium Compendium International Bourges 2001 29e Concours International de Musique et d’Art Sonore Electroacoustiques, Bourges: Lauréats du Magisterium et du Trivium Laurie Radford 102 Electric Music Collective: Incandescence Electric Music Collective: Defiant Corey Cheng 106 Music From SEAMUS, Volume 13 rachMiel 108 Joel Chadabe: Many Times . rachMiel 110 Richard Karpen: Solo/Tutti Frances White 112 Products 114 Waves Audio Restoration and Noise Reduction Toolkit BIAS Sound Soap Pro Pro-Audio Restoration Software James Harley 114 Products of Interest 121 DVD Program Notes 135 Instructions to Contributors 142 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2006.30.4.1 by guest on 26 September 2021 Announcements Happy Birthday, Max Mathews: playing his own invention, the Radio of Groupe de Recherches Musicales MaxFest, Music, and a Baton. The event commemorates not (GRM) in Paris, is a co-author and ed- Monograph only Max Mathews’s 80th birthday itorial coordinator of Portraits Poly- and a half-century of his work, but chromes: John Chowning (reviewed in also the 110th anniversary of Henry Computer Music Journal 30:1 [Spring Max Mathews (see Figure 1) is often Cowell’s birth. The Stanford Sym- 2006]). The Portraits Polychromes se- referred to as “the father of computer phony Orchestra (conducted by Sandor ries of books from GRM also covers a music” in recognition of his pioneer- Salgo) had also performed the world number of other important figures in ing research at Bell Laboratories on premiere of Rhythmicana in 1971, computer and electroacoustic music, computer-synthesized musical forty years after it was composed.