1. Introduction to Music Informatics
Donald Byrd
Rev. 1 Sept. 2006
Copyright © 2006, Donald Byrd

2. Welcome This is a very exciting time for music!
Music informatics is hard to teach
Music and technology are both changing quickly
Few students have much background in both
Solution: compromise
Spend some time bringing each “up to speed”
Reduce technical demands in both areas
What is music informatics?
Similar to music information technology

3. Class Procedures Communication Grading
Web site
Announcements in class
OnCourse: not for now
Grading
Project & presentations are most important
Participation is important
Importance/frequency of quizzes is TBD
Goal: avoid “death by PowerPoint”

4. 1. Our Own Music
Student music background: 2 grad degree, 4 undergrad degree, 4 no degree (wide variety)
Assignment: compose simple melodies with Impromptu
Bamberger paper
Experiment with Impromptu shows dev. of intuitive musical understanding
Claim: musically untrained people can still create music following cultural archetypes
Purpose for us?

5. 1. Our Own Music Different approaches to research
Highly controlled environments
More objective, easier to quantify results
Less controlled
Better for exploration
Sim. to “naturalists 1st, scientists later” idea
Music isn’t a science! But…
What music “scholars” do similar to what “scientists” (esp. social scientists) do

6. 1. Our Own Music Different approaches to research
What “scholars” do similar to what “scientists” (esp. social scientists) do
Good reason: music is subtle, but not magic!
David Huron: Explanatory Goals of Music Analysis
Learned as a music student: “methodology is fetish; rigour is a form of self-deception”
…as a music scholar: methodology is “simply a way of internalizing the lessons learned from past scholarly mistakes”

7. 1. Our Own Music
Bring in “Music We’re Interested In”
Soon (next week)

8. 1. Programming in R: No Problem!
R is very interactive: can use as powerful calculator
Assignments will be simple
Much help available: from Don & other students
Why R?
NOT because it's great for statistics!
easy to do simple things with it, including graphs and handling audio files
probably not good for complex programs
free, and available for all popular operating systems
very interactive => easy to experiment
has good documentation
Chris Raphael is using it, and he thinks it's good for music informatics
Chris Raphael is using it, and standardizing is a good thing

9. 1. Rudiments of R How to get R Tutorial:
Originally for statistics; good for far more
How to get R
Web site:
Versions for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows
Tutorial:
R as a powerful graphing, musicing, etc. calculator

10. 1. Rudiments of Musical Acoustics
Need some musical acoustics for almost anything in digital audio
Need some now (use with R), more later
Acoustics: part of physics
Concepts like frequency & amplitude
Psychoacoustics: part of psychology
Concepts like pitch & loudness