From: Malcolm Slaney Date: November 3, 2007 1:43:26 PM PDT To: hearing-seminar@ccrma.stanford.edu Subject: Tonality at *Wednesday* Hearing Seminar I'm very pleased to announced that Prof. Elaine Chew, from USC, will be talking about her work on measuring and recognizing tonality in music. Tonality, as I understand it, describes the harmonic construction of a piece of music, both in frequency and over time. Elaine will tell us how to visualize tonality and how to use these visualizations to understand our perception of music. This is a special Wednesday afternoon talk. Not Thursday. Who: Elaine Chew (USC) What: MuSA.RT and the Visualization of Tonality When: **** Wednesday, November 7 at 4PM **** Where: CCRMA Seminar Room Bring your favorite tonality perceivers. - Malcolm ________________________________ MuSA.RT and the Visualization of Tonality A Hearing Seminar 4PM, Wednesday, November 7, 2007 Elaine Chew University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering 2007-2008 Science Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~echew Abstract The talk will begin with an introduction to the Spiral Array model (Chew 2000) and its associated algorithms for recognizing and tracking tonality in music. Tonality refers to the system by which pitches relate one to another to generate varying degrees of perceived stabilities amongst the pitches. The Spiral Array offers a way to represent tonality and the perceived relations amongst its interacting elements. Questions that pertain to tonality include: why does this phrase sound finished, and that one not? how does one create tension and release in a composition? what are some bases for musical humour? where in a piece should one stretch the time values of notes in an expressive performance to produce the desired emotional effect? Musical illustrations will provide some answers to these questions. The illustrations will be brought to live through the MuSA.RT system for real-time tonal analysis and visualization, based on the Spiral Array model. The MuSA.RT project is joint work with Alexandre Francois. Biosketch Elaine Chew is an Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and of Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, where she founded and directs the Music Computation and Cognition Laboratory. In the 2007-2008 academic year, Elaine is a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she and Alexandre Francois form a cluster on "Analytical Listening Through Interactive Visualization". Elaine Chew earned a BAS in mathematical and computational sciences with honors and music with distinction from Stanford University, and PhD and SM degrees in operations research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT. Awards and support for her work include the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering and the National Science Foundation Early Career and Information Technology Research grants. She also holds diplomas in piano performance from Trinity College, London.