Archive for the ‘composition’ tag
David Cope & Style-based composition
My research survey in style-based automated composition is happening as a result of an independent study supervised by Professor Bruce Pennycook at the University of Texas @ Austin. Professor Pennycook directed my attention to the work of David cope, who has done much of the grounding for this field. I’m starting my review of David Cope’s work by reading “Computers and Musical Style”, published in 1991.
In reading about musical style representations, I suppose I’m not surprised to learn that there are overlaps between linguistic patterns in the way that we construct language to the way in which music can thought of as language. To help illustrate this connection, Cope compares the diagrammatic parsing of sentences in a way that’s analogous to a diagrammatic parsing of music.
Cope also formulates a definition of ‘musical style’ for his book in a way that relates style with characteristics of music & musical structures. He talks about style as,
“the identifiable characteristics of a composer’s music which are recognizably similar from one work to another. These include, but are not limited to, pitch and duration…timbre, dynamics and nuance. “
Cope goes on to discuss other elements that have a “grammar” which constitute style when appear repeatedly across multiple works. These include: melody, harmony, & counterpoint, as well as their connections to introductions, motives, transitions, modulations, & cadences.
I look forward to digging deeper in hopes that I can catch a glimpse of how these elements fit together & can be structurally represented as style, which as I believe Cope has gone on to demonstrate, can then be represented through the language of programming.