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The Yin Yang Theory in Sound and Music: a First Exploration

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The Yin Yang Theory in Sound and Music: a First Exploration 6. REFERENCES [14] T. L. Hubbard, “Synesthesia-like mappings of light- ness, pitch, and melodic interval,” The American [1] N. Adams, Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Journal of Psychology, vol. 109, no. 2, pp. 219–238, THE YIN YANG THEORY IN SOUND AND MUSIC: A FIRST Music. Routledge, 2006, ch. Visualization of Mu- 1996. EXPLORATION sical Signals, pp. 13–28. [15] A. Hyvarinen,¨ “Survey on independent component [2] S. Barrass, “Auditory information design,” Ph.D. Leonardo Gabrielli analysis,” Neural Computing Surveys, vol. 2, pp. Daniele Gabrielli dissertation, The Australian National University, 94–128, 1999. Dept. Information Engineering, Canberra, Australia, 1997. Universita` di Macerata, [16] W. Kohler,¨ Gestalt psychology. Oxford, England: Universita` Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy [3] J. L. Bentley, “Multidimensional binary search trees Liveright, 1929. Macerata, Italy used for associative searching,” Communications of [email protected] the ACM, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 509–517, 1975. [17] L. E. Marks, “On cross-modal similarity: The per- ceptual structure of pitch, loudness, and brightness,” [4] G. Coleman, “Mused: Navigating the personal Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Per- ABSTRACT Although the seemingly dualist approach at the basis sample library,” in Proceedings of the Interna- ception and Performance, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 586– of this theory may seem excessively reductionist, thus ap- tional Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2007). 602, August 1989. Today the Chinese theory of the Yin and Yang principles is parently making the object of highly specialized techni- Copenhagen, Denmark: Ann Arbor, MI: Scholarly well known in western countries, often in its philosophical cal knowledge a trivial matter, it is not. On the contrary, Publishing Office, University of Michigan Library, [18] ——, “On perceptual metaphors,” Metaphor and aspects. However, in the far east it has been used for mil- by incorporating many aspects of the object under anal- 2007. Symbolic Activity, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 39–66, 1996. lenia to explain and solve pragmatic problems. Notwith- ysis, it achieves a holistic gaze, enabling to better deal standing its fuzzy and holistic nature, the Yin Yang theory with complex phenomena such as those related to human [5] S. Dupont, C. Frisson, X. Siebert, and D. Tardieu, [19] D. Maurer, T. Pathman, and C. J. Mondloch, “The has already been successfully applied to the analysis of perception, emotion and health. Objections to holistic ap- “Browsing sound and music libraries by similarity,” shape of boubas: sound–shape correspondences in physical and biological systems. In this paper, the the- proaches are often made by scientists, especially in fields in Proceedings of the 128th Convention of the Audio toddlers and adults,” Developmental Science, vol. 9, ory is extended to the field of acoustic signals and their like medicine and medical care where the health of people Engineering Society, London, UK, May 2010. no. 3, pp. 316–322, 2006. time-frequency representation, allowing for a simple yet is at stake. It must be stated, however, that modern medi- [6] K. K. Evans and A. Treisman, “Natural cross-modal [20] E. Pampalk, A. Rauber, and D. Merkl, “Content- functional way to analyze, discuss and formalize various cal science because of the drastically sectorial knowledge mappings between visual and auditory features,” based organization and visualization of music aspects of sound, accessible to experts and non-experts. (which helped fighting e.g. communicable diseases in the Journal of Vision, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 6.1–12, January archives,” in MULTIMEDIA ’02: Proceedings of the The framework can also have application on synthesis al- past century), is now failing to provide effective therapies 2010. tenth ACM international conference on Multimedia. gorithms, generative music and music therapy. Two high- and prevention to noncommunicable diseases such as car- diovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases [7] M. Ferreira de Oliveira and H. Levkowitz, “From vi- New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2002, pp. 570–579. level features for automatic analysis are proposed based and diabetes [2], which are found in both high-income and sual data exploration to visual data mining: A sur- on MPEG-7 low-level descriptors and future scenarios to [21] N. Sagiv and J. Ward, “Crossmodal interactions: low-income countries and can be prevented with a change vey,” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Com- assess sound properties and their effect on human subjects lessons from synesthesia,” in Visual Perception in lifestyle and dietary habits [31]. In fact, there have been puter Graphics, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 378–394, 2003. are discussed. Fundamentals of Awareness: Multi-Sensory Inte- documented cases of successful applications of holistic [8] K. Giannakis, “Sound mosaics,” Ph.D. dissertation, gration and High-Order Perception, ser. Progress in approaches to medicine. An excellent example is the mac- Middlesex University, London, UK, October 2001. Brain Research, S. Martinez-Conde, S. L. Macknik, 1. INTRODUCTION robiotic diet [24, 20, 17], a well-defined dietary regimen L. M. Martinez, J.-M. Alonso, and P. U. Tse, Eds. based on the Yin Yang principle and on the Five Elements [9] ——, “A comparative evaluation of auditory- Elsevier, 2006, vol. 155, pp. 259 – 271. For millennia, the Yin Yang theory has been one of the pil- theory, which is proving capable of reducing risks and visual mappings for sound visualisation,” Organised lars of ancient Asian thoughts, used practically to describe greatly improve health conditions in individuals affected Sound, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 297–307, 2006. [22] D. Schwarz and N. Schnell, “Sound search by all aspects of life and properties of objects and living be- by several chronic diseases [25, 13, 11]. content-based navigation in large databases,” in [10] L. Ginsberg, “A case of synaesthesia,” The American ings. The theory is the pillar of several eastern philoso- The Yin Yang theory has also been applied in com- Proceedings of the 6th Sound and Music Computing Journal of Psychology, vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 582–589, phies and beliefs, such as Taoism and Zen. The Bagua putational sciences and logic, where it inspired the for- Conference (SMC 2009), Porto, Portugal, July 2009, October 1923. (eight trigrams) and Five Element theory, on which Feng malization of a bipolar fuzzy set [35], machine learning pp. 253–258. Shui and I King are based, stem from Yin and Yang. techniques [34, 33, 16] and of a pattern classification sys- [11] T. Grill, “Constructing high-level perceptual audio Western thinkers have been highly fascinated by such [23] G. Strobl, G. Eckel, and D. Rocchesso, “Sound tex- tem for mental disorders [36]. We can probably say that descriptors for textural sounds,” in Proceedings of eastern concepts. A remarkable example in contemporary ture modeling: A survey,” in Proceedings of the the ancient Yin Yang theory can be applied to most, if not the 9th Sound and Music Computing Conference music is John Cage’s extensive use of the I King divina- 2006 Sound and Music Computing (SMC) Interna- all, fields of human knowledge and practice, with good (SMC 2012), Copenhagen, Denmark, July 2012, tion book for composition by chance [12]. It must be tional Conference, Marseille, France, 2006, pp. 61– chances of achieving benefits by gathering a broader un- forthcoming. noted, however, that the Yin Yang theory must not be re- 65. derstanding. garded “as a religious belief or a principle of lifestyle“ [12] T. Grill, A. Flexer, and S. Cunningham, “Identifica- It is our belief, thus, that the Yin Yang theory can [18] but a rather more practical knowledge. Not surpris- tion of perceptual qualities in textural sounds using [24] L. van der Maaten and G. Hinton, “Visualizing data be applied to music and sound by direct extension of the ingly some western scientists have found connections be- the repertory grid method,” in Proceedings of the using t-SNE,” Journal of Machine Learning Re- physical properties of Yin and Yang, as has been done in tween the Chinese theory and the results of contemporary 6th Audio Mostly Conference, ser. AM ’11. New search, vol. 9, pp. 2579–2605, 2008. other fields of physics and biology. Henceforth, if this physics. An extensive review of the funding principle to theory is properly applied and it is correlated to emotional York, NY, USA: ACM, 2011, pp. 67–74. [25] C. Ware, Information Visualization: Perception for ancient eastern theories and the evidences of their validity states and human activities (the ancient theory does cate- design. San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kauf- [13] S. Heise, M. Hlatky, and J. Loviscach, “SoundTorch: in modern physics is contained in F. Capra’s work “The gorize these in terms of Yin and Yang), it can prove prof- mann Publishers Inc., 2000. Quick Browsing in Large Audio Collections,” in Tao of Physics” [3]. Holistic thinking is also highly re- itable for different scenarios, e.g.: Proceedings of the 125th Convention of the Audio garded in contemporary theory of dynamical systems or Engineering Society, San Francisco, CA, USA, Oc- chaos theory, which exploits new theories drawn from bi- for composers or performers to drive high-level au- • tober 2008. ology and mathematics [4]. tomatic composition or synthesis techniques in a _596 _597 more holistic way, thus delegating all the problems arts [5] and Feng Shui (which has gained in popularity 3. EXTENSION OF THE YIN YANG THEORY TO related to low-level control and the large dimension also in western countries [7]), to name a few. In histori- SOUND of the parameters space to the machine; cal times, the theory has spread outside the boundaries of China, such as in Japan, Korea and Vietnam. In this paper we demonstrate how the rules on the inter- for artists of different backgrounds to communicate • The Yin Yang theory is based on the concept that all play between Yin and Yang can be applied also to sound.
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