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Computational Analysis of Musical Form

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Computational Music Analysis

Abstract

Can a computer understand musical forms? Musical forms describe how a piece of music is structured. They explain how the sections work together through repetition, contrast, and variation: repetition brings unity, and variation brings interest. Learning how to hear, to analyse, to play, or even to write music in various forms is part of music education. In this chapter, we briefly review some theories of musical form, and discuss the challenges of computational analysis of musical form. We discuss two sets of problems, segmentation and form analysis. We present studies in music information retrieval (MIR) related to both problems. Thinking about codification and automatic analysis of musical forms will help the development of better MIR algorithms.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS, Paris, France

    Mathieu Giraud

  2. Centre de Recherche en Informatique, Signal et Automatique de Lille (CRIStAL), Université de Lille 1, Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

    Mathieu Giraud

  3. Laboratoire Modélisation, Information et Systèmes, Université Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France

    Richard Groult & Florence Levé

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  1. Mathieu Giraud
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  2. Richard Groult
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  3. Florence Levé
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Correspondence to Mathieu Giraud .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Arch., Design & Media Tech, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

    David Meredith

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Giraud, M., Groult, R., Levé, F. (2016). Computational Analysis of Musical Form. In: Meredith, D. (eds) Computational Music Analysis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25931-4_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25931-4_5

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