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IOE 899: Seminar in Industrial and Operations Engineering
Wed Feb 16, 2005, 4:00-5:00pm, 1680 IOE

Elaine Chew, University of Southern California
"Mathematical Modeling and Computational Analysis of Tonal Contexts and Segmentation in Music "

Abstract
Techniques for automatic analysis of musical content that produce results that concur with human perception and cognition of music is an integral part of music information retrieval systems -- picture a musical Google. Tonal music, that is, almost all the music that we hear, is perceived as operating within a tonal context that evolves over time. The context organizes the musical information with reference to a tonal center. This ability to perceive and to know this tonal context is ingrained in our hearing of music. This talk will present a mathematical model for tonality called the Spiral Array and its application to tonal induction and segmentation. Distinct from previous network representations for musical pitch, the Spiral Array represents musical objects as convex combinations of their constituents so that tonal induction can be modeled as a nearest neighbor search, and tonal boundaries as points of maximal separation between neighboring contexts, in the interior of the spiral representations. The talk will also touch upon some recent work on applying these tonal analysis algorithms to musical audio and real-time interactive music systems.
 
Bio
Elaine Chew is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, where she is affiliated with the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC). Dr. Chew received her SM and PhD in Operations Research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BAS in Music and Computational Mathematics from Stanford University. Her honors include Career and Information Technology Research awards from the National Science Foundation, and an Office of Naval Research Graduate Fellowship. Her principal research interests lie in the design and application of computational models and algorithms for problems in music perception and cognition. She is the organizer of several special sessions on Music and OR at INFORMS meetings, and guest editor of a special cluster on Music and Computation for the INFORMS Journal on Computing. She has also created a new course on Engineering Approaches to Music Perception and Cognition covering state-of-the-art research in music representation, structural analysis and interactive systems.

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