Music Across Music: Towards a Corpus-Based Interactive Computer-Aided Composition

200 Pages·2017·49.48 MB·English

Music Across Music: Towards a
Corpus-Based, Interactive
Computer-Aided Composition
A thesis presented by
Ghisi
Daniele
Université Pierre et Marie Curie
Université Paris-Sorbonne
Sorbonne Universités
École doctorale Informatique, Télécommunications et Électronique
Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique
UMR STMS 9912
To obtain the title of Doctor of Philosophy
Specialty: Music Research and Composition
Thesis Supervisor: Carlos Augusto Agon Amado
Defended on December 19th, 2017
Jury:
Reviewers: Georg Hajdu - HfMT (Hamburg)
Pierre Alexandre Tremblay - University of Huddersfield
Supervisor: Carlos Augusto Agon Amado - UPMC (Paris)
Co-supervisor: Pierre Couprie - Université Paris-Sorbonne
Examinators: Jean-Pierre Briot - UPMC (Paris)
Myriam Desainte-Catherine - LaBRI (Bordeaux)
Miller Smith Puckette - University of California San Diego
Invited: Jean-Baptiste Barrière
Yannis Kyriakides

Abstract
The reworking of existing music in order to build new one is a quintessential char-
acteristic of the Western musical tradition. This thesis proposes and discusses my
personalapproachtothesubject: theborrowingofmusicfragmentsfromlarge-scale
corpora (containing audio samples as well as symbolic scores) in order to build a
low-level, descriptor-based palette of grains. A fundamental meaning of composing
is hence embodied in the acts of filtering, ordering, organizing and querying, whose
parameters are handled via digital hybrid scores, in order to equip corpus-based
composition with the control of notational practices. Some personal techniques are
presented, along with the aesthetic choices that motivated them and the musical
works to which they relate. Most of these techniques can be subsumed under a
larger exploratory attitude towards music: composition is an interactive, intuitive
discovery—more than an ‘invention’.
This thesis also introduces the dada library, designed and developed with these
considerations in mind, providing Max [Puckette, 2002] with the ability to organize,
select and generate musical content via a set of graphical interfaces manifesting the
aforementioned exploratory approach. Its modules address a range of scenarios,
including, but not limited to, database visualization, score segmentation and analy-
sis, concatenative synthesis, music generation via physical or geometrical modelling,
waveterrainsynthesis,graphexploration,cellularautomata,swarmintelligence,and
videogames. The library is open-source and extendable; similarly to bach [Agostini
and Ghisi, 2013], it fosters a performative approach to computer-aided composition
(as opposed to traditional off-line techniques): the outcome of all its interfaces can
beeasilyrecordedinscores, orusedinrealtimetodrive, amongotherthings, digital
signal processes, score transformations, video treatments, or physical actuators.
Finally, this thesis addresses the issue of whether classical representation of mu-
sic, disentangled in the standard set of traditional parameters, is optimal. Two
possible alternatives to orthogonal decompositions are presented: grain-based score
representations, inheriting techniques from corpus-based composition, and unsu-
pervised machine learning models, providing entangled, ‘agnostic’ representations
of music. As a lateral yet related subject, the thesis details my first experience of
collaborativewritingwithinthe/nu/thing collective,inopencontrastwiththecom-
mon image of the composer as a Cartesian ‘solitary self’: although in very different
ways, corpus-based composition, generative neural networks and collective practices
all cause into question the scope of musical authorship.
Keywords: computer-aided composition, corpus-basedcomposition, music rep-
resentation, real time, Max, bach, dada, neural networks, machine learning, collec-
tive writing

Acknowledgments
First and foremost I want to thank my supervisor, Carlos Agon, for his guidance
throughout this research study, and my co-supervisor, Pierre Couprie, for his sup-
port.
Secondly, I am not so sure this thesis would have even existed had I not met,
some ten years ago, Andrea Agostini, with whom I share a large portion of musical
research—and yes, I might have ‘borrowed’ from him a couple of ideas along the
way: I hope I returned them with due credit and with at least some minimal added
value. I would like to thank Eric Maestri, whose insights have often been cause
for reflection, and the other members of the /nu/thing collective (Andrea Sarto,
RaffaeleGrimaldi),whichisprobablythemostpurposefulexperienceIhaverecently
undertook. I would like to thank Marco Momi, Giovanni Bertelli, Carmine Cella for
their keen observations that have shed some light on my doubts more than once.
I would also like to thank Boris Labbé: the collaboration with him has shaped a
portion of the ideas proposed in this thesis.
Importantly, I would like to thank the entire Ircam community (not just re-
searchers, but production, pedagogy and RIMs as well) for making me feel always
at home. I am particularly grateful to Moreno Andreatta, Gérard Assayag, Julia
Blondeau, Eric Daubresse, Jean Louis Giavitto, Marco Liuni and Yan Maresz for
their support and their suggestions on my researches; to Mattia G. Bergomi and
Philippe Esling for their assistance and their fascinating intuitions; to Robin Meier
for his aid and support on the project La fabrique des monstres; and to Léopold
Crestel, for helping me tweak recurrent neural networks models.
I am grateful to Fabien Lévy and Mikhail Malt for their observations on my
mid-term summary report.
IamespeciallygratefultoGeorgHajduandPierreAlexandreTremblayfortheir
thorough review of this thesis.

Additional credits
Sections 2.3.1, 2.3.2 and 2.3.3 have been previously published, in a slightly different
form, in
• Ghisi, D. and Bergomi, M. (2016). Concatenative synthesis via chord-based
segmentation for An Experiment with Time. In Proceedings of the Interna-
tional Computer Music Conference, Utrecht, Nederlands.
Some portions of sections 3.1 and 3.2.4, as well as the the entirety of sections 3.2.2
and 3.5 have been previously published, in a slightly different form, in
• Ghisi, D. and Agostini, A. (2017). Extending bach: A Family of Libraries
for Real-time Computer-assisted Composition in Max. Journal of New Music
Research, 46(1):34–53.
Some portions of section 3.3.2 have been previously published in
• Ghisi,D.andAgon,C.(2016). Real-timecorpus-basedconcatenativesynthesis
for symbolic notation. In Proceedings of the TENOR Conference, Cambridge,
United Kingdom.
Sections 3.4.1, 3.4.2 and 3.4.3 have been previously published, in a slightly different
form, in
• Ghisi, D., Agostini, A., and Maestri, E. (2016). Recreating Gérard Grisey’s
Vortex Temporum with cage. In Proceedings of the International Computer
Music Conference, Utrecht, Nederlands.
Section 4.4.2 expands and elaborates some ideas developed by the whole /nu/thing
group while writing the dossier for I mille fuochi dell’universo.
In addition, some examples were presented in the following talks:
• Interfaces reactives pour la composition assistée par ordinateur en temps réel,
Collegium Musicae, Ircam, Paris (13/05/2016)
• Tabula plena: un tentativo di orientamento alla composizione attraverso le
basi di dati, Budrio, Dialoghi sul comporre (28/12/2016)
• Music and the Digital, Biennale Digital, Venezia (03/02/2017)
• Synthèse par RNNs pour “La fabrique des monstres”, Meridién Ircam, Paris
(05/09/2017)
• Corpus-Based Composition and Interactive Computer Interfaces, Institute for
Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich (02/10/2017)

Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Music across music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Outline . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.3 A disclaimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2 Towards a Corpus-Based Composition 13
2.1 Corpus-based composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2.1.1 Musical borrowing in Western musical tradition . . . . . . . . 13
2.1.2 A new kind of authorship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.1.3 Exploring the tabula plena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.1.4 The Discography of Babel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
2.1.5 Personal references . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2.1.6 Comparison with other compositional researches . . . . . . . 23
2.2 Describing and organizing content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.2.1 Music descriptors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
2.2.2 Micromontage, granular synthesis, concatenation, musaicing . 27
2.3 Chord-based concatenations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.3.1 An Experiment with Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
2.3.2 Database and segmentation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
2.3.3 Compositional framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
2.3.4 Usage in I mille fuochi dell’universo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
2.4 A poetic of concatenation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
2.4.1 Concatenations as trajectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
2.4.2 Music across music: Electronic Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.5 Speech and corpus-based composition. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
2.5.1 The utopia of a bridge between speech and music . . . . . . . 42
2.5.2 MFCC-based musaicing in Mon corps parle tout seul . . . . . 43
2.5.3 Concatenation of spoken words for Any Road . . . . . . . . . 45
2.6 A query-based approach to musical samples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
2.6.1 The Well Tempered Sampler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
2.7 Concatenation of sung words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
2.8 A symbolic approach: a database of scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
3 Towards a Real-Time Computer-Aided Composition 59
3.1 Real-time computer-aided composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
3.2 Previous work: the bach paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2.1 bach: automated composer’s helper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
3.2.2 Comparison with other software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.2.3 Extending bach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
3.2.4 The cage library . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68
viii Contents
3.3 dada: non-standard user interfaces for computer-aided composition . 72
3.3.1 The scope of dada . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
3.3.2 Tools for corpus-based composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
3.3.3 Tools for physical or geometrical modelling of music. . . . . . 84
3.3.4 Rule-based systems, graphs, and music as a game . . . . . . . 94
3.3.5 Comparison with other software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
3.3.6 Future work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
3.4 Meta-scores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
3.4.1 Hybrid scores as instruments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
3.4.2 Meta-scores in bach and cage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
3.4.3 An analysis case study: Vortex temporum . . . . . . . . . . . 114
3.4.4 Applications to composition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
3.5 Perspectives on the bach family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
4 Towards a Parameter Entangled Computer-Aided Composition 127
4.1 An entanglement of parameters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
4.1.1 Traditional notation as a Cartesian model . . . . . . . . . . . 127
4.1.2 Why we need some degree of entanglement . . . . . . . . . . 130
4.2 Grain-based score representations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
4.3 Artificial neural networks: a composer’s take. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135
4.3.1 Sample-based generative networks for La fabrique des monstres136
4.3.2 Recurrent network models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
4.3.3 Using visual representations of sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
4.3.4 Conclusions and perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
4.4 An experiment in collective writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
4.4.1 /nu/thing and I mille fuochi dell’universo . . . . . . . . . . . 157
4.4.2 Towards a collective writing of music . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158
5 Conclusion 161
5.1 Main contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
5.2 Open problems and future work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164
A Catalogue of works 169
B List of articles 173
Bibliography 175