Oh, beautiful.

[memnus]

It's raining. Not the great torrential downpours the desert is prone to, but calm, steady rain. It's nice, really. I can almost trick myself into believing that it will clean things, leave everything fresh for the last two weeks of classes.

Oh, man. Only two weeks of classes left. That's pretty scary to think about, actually. Most particularly, it's scary to think about the music perception project that I'm very much not on top of, and hardly know where to start. I've requested the book that Cramer suggested from Link+, and then when it gets here I'll walk through the stacks in the area he suggested and see if anything catches my eye. Does anyone on here know if there are any published context-free grammars for either music or simplified English?

Crimeny.

click

Comments

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

You have a prof called Cramer.

::weirded out::

[zwilichkl.livejournal.com]

What book did your Prof. suggest? And what are context-free grammars (I know I've heard it before, quick refresher on why you're interested)?

[memnus.livejournal.com]

The book was "introduction to tonal theory" by peter westergaard. A CFG is a grammar where each token can either be a terminal symbol or be decomposed into one or more other tokens, independent of tokens nearby.

Some random thoughts

[zwilichkl.livejournal.com]

This is probably not helpful, but you might check out Narmour Analysis (I looked at it a bit when working for Thom). Actually, it might be useful:

"The theoretical constants Narmour uses are context-free and, therefore, applicable to all styles of melody. He places considerable emphasis on the listener's cognitive performance (that is, fundamental melodic perception as opposed to acquired musical competence). He concentrates almost exclusively on low-level, note-to-note relations. The result is a highly generalized theory useful in researching all manner of psychological and music-theoretic problems concerned with the analysis and cognition of melody."

The stuff is sort of complicated but it might be what you're looking for.

Another big name in Music Perception is Diana Deutsch.

From a more programming side, maybe you'd find David Cope's work interesting (the Nelson Speaker Guy). He programs all of his stuff in LISP, and his books include code.