Hola, mundo

I am a computer music doctorate student. I recently received a Fulbright grant to travel to Buenos Aires to create interactive tango music for milongas. Milongas are Argentine tango social dances and interactive music means that the dancers control music with their movements when they dance via motion capture. I am a composer, software developer, and tango dancer -- so I'm doing all the parts.

This blog will be a collection of my research ideas, links, and thoughts.  Right now I am working on how to get 6-8 Kinects to work together and provide the information that I want. And even before I start on that again, I am working on this paper that has grown huge and swallowed me whole.

The idea for this paper is this: that I can measure the structure of both music and dance using self-similarity matrices, and therefore, I posit that using this tool, I can find an 'identity' for Cage and Cunningham's Variations V. I propose that the identity of this works lies in the interaction of music and movement, and that the relationship between the two, rather than traditional means of musical identity of structure (eg, melody, harmony, rhythmic content, timbre -- anything regarded as 'content' per se).

I create the similarity matrices using extracted features from each medium, and then compare the matrices of the music and the dance. If only I could even find an actual musicology paper that uses self-similarity matrices. While proposed as a tool for musical analysis I have found it only used in the fields of music information retrieval and audio processing... and sometimes in music cognition. Usually the authors know the structure of the works beforehand, and then show how their method works for IDing this structure. Sometimes they show that this feature is good for database retrieval of audio or that it matches well with listener's perceptions of the work. These are useful papers, don't get me wrong. And I'm sure I'm missing something -- the musicological papers that use this tool, while rare, probably exist (arrrghhh). And no one has used them in the manner that I am using them.

This is great, I guess. In a way. And its a paper for an incomplete class, after which I will have no classes, just research. But I want to be solid enough to publish... after all, I spent so much on it.  Anyways, so the first part of this blog will be my struggles in ending the analysis for this paper, and finally turning it in...