Classical Convert

Automatically Understanding the Emotional Content of Music

I’m back from the bright and sunny reaches and beaches of the Northeast. Me and my girlfriend slipped away to Maine for a couple of memorial weekendified discount workdays, where we climbed over multiple forts, waded out to islands (well, one island) in the freakin’ frigid Atlantic water, and ate several huge, unhealthy and thoroughly delicious meals. After churning through mountains of read-this and meet-then style eMails from my supervisor, I finally have a bit of time to feed this site a rather needed update.

While we were up pottering around Portland I remembered a project I thought would be really cool, once upon a time. The idea was to write software which would automatically analyze the tonal relationships throughout a piece of music, telling you what the key changes and harmonies were, and when they occurred.

It was driven by my lack of understanding of musical theory. I recognize modulations and harmonies which make me feel a certain way, which obviously encode some kinda fundamental emotional response (either natured or nurtured, I’m not sure which and I bet a ton of people disagree) but which I can’t point to and say: “Aha! Clearly it’s a iv-I modulation that is making me existentially angsty.” That frustrates me, and I feel like learning this stuff from scratch via really properly learning a musical instrument is gonna take way more spare time and (more importantly) devotion than I have on hand.

So, I thought an automatic type shortcut would be fantastic. It doesn’t even seem too terribly tricky (but then, nothing like this ever does until you start doing it). Since each note has a characteristic frequency (well, I guess a bunch of them with all the harmonics) it seems like pretty much all you need to do is to do a bunch of Fourier transforms to work out which notes are being played, and bam, you’ve got your harmonies. By looking at which notes are coming up in short periods of time you can work out the key.

Someone has to have done this already. This page has a bunch of links but most of them seem all 404ey. Actually, this seems much more along the lines of what I’m thinking of. I reckon I need to have a good old search around the internet for projects like this, I’ll let you know what I come up with.

24 (or: Jack Bauer’s Preludes and Fugues)

It was the season finale of 24 last night. Quite frankly I’m sort of relieved it’s over with, as I now have my Monday nights back, plus it was getting (dare I say it) kinda lame. For anyone who isn’t aware of the general premise of this show, it’s set in “real-time” so that the entire series of 24 episodes represents one day in the life of agent Jack Bauer. Since they’re up to series 6 already, he clearly manages to have repeatedly incredibly interesting and dramatic days. Sort of like exactly the opposite of a physics graduate student. For anyone who is aware of this show, you might like the per-episode awarding of points to the main characters at this site.

So what does this have to do with classical music? Well since you’re so damn keen and insistent I’ll tell you - if you haven’t guessed already. 24… right? Well, that’s the ever so standard number of preludes and/or fugues which composers like composing - they naturally pick that number because there are that many possible keys you can compose in, if you use the diatonic scale. 7 white notes to start on, plus 5 black notes, gives you twelve - times two for major and minor.

So what I’m getting at is: since 24 kinda sucks now, and it seems as though it’s the same plotline over and over, they need a change. They need to mix it up a little. My suggested change is instead of doing one episode for each hour in the day, do one episode for each possible key in the diatonic scale. Alright, stop laughing now. I’m almost serious.

Each episode would be themed according to the ‘feel” of the key. Since nowadays we use equal temperament I guess the keys have lost their individual feels, but for example, c-minor can still be considered all emotional and Beethoveney (coz that’s what he liked). Pulling a few more key-mood relationships off of wikipedia we have: D-minor - counterpoint (For an episode theme we can have two stories being told at the same time), A-flat major - slow (I dunno, an episode where everyone gets stuck in traffic?), G-minor (tragic consummation - use your filthy imagination).

Yeah, I know it’s more than a tad unlikely that Fox would do this, but I reckon it’s kind of a cute idea. I’d love to make a bunch of short films, one in each key. Actually it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it’s already been done.

PS - If anybody can tell me which movie the picture of Kiefer above is from they’ll get a prize.

PPS - Maybe.

PPPS - Well, probably not. But I’ll be impressed.

Too Much Science, Not Enough Sleep

Okay okay… I’ve been way too distracted with work recently for my or anyone elses liking. After reading about grounding, and op-amps, and other similarly geeky but necessarily distracting items for the last three hours my brain is all churned to numerical mush. Hopefully, writing about artsy musical type stuff will distract me from my analysing enough to sleep.

Actually, speaking of (yeah, typing of, I know) analyzing - I can’t decide whether to use z’s or s’s tonight - stuff, I have a grand idea at the moment to categorize composers. Wow, that sounds so incredibly unexciting dunnit? Well it almost gets more exciting: what I wanna do is to plot a bunch of composers as points a graph, so that people can be like “Ah! Mozart has an x co-ordinate of 0.76 and a y-co-ordinate of 0.12, therefore I shall listen to him!” I’ll have a bunch of composers on the graph and it’ll be interesting to see how they group, who is on opposite corners, etc.
The only problem is, I don’t really have any idea what the x and y axis are going to be.

It’s also going to be horribly subjective, but maybe I’ll just push it totally in that direction.  Hmm. This is starting to remind of the time that I wanted to work out a color wheel for flavors, so that one could easily come up with good recipe ideas by choosing flavor-schemes which were simulacra of things like a split-complimentary color scheme.

Oh my gosh I’m getting totally off topic. Bedtime.

Can Someone Convince Me Bruckner is Awesome?

Whenever I go back home to the shining old jewel in the Atlantic that is the UK, I’m always accosted by huge groups of people who are completely in love with bloody Bruckner.  For some reason my sparents (this is my very cunning word to describe one half of my remarried parents, kinda like step-parents, but you know, portmanteaued) are completely embedded in groups of Bruckner fanatics.

I’ll admit I don’t really know that much of old Anton, but from what I can tell he goes on… and on… and on and bloody on (or should that be: ant on. Oh my what a comedic genius I am tonight) . He’s like a more romantic Shostakovich with absolutely no focus or schedule. He seems to like stretching one or two pretty decent ideas  over about ten times too much music.

Now, I’m sure there are some Bruckner fanatics out there who can set me straight and make me totally fall in love with him, so, errr, what pieces would you suggest? Either that, or tell me to completely give up on him as a lost cause for my tastes.

My Latest Listening Material

In the last week or so I’ve been particularly listening to/discovering:

• Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 30, Op. 109 - The next installment in my apparently accidental quest to work backwards through Beethoven’s solo piano repertoire. It’s similar to number 32, sorta. There are two relatively quick and dramatic initial movements followed by a paced, more gentle set of variations for the finale. I love the contrast between the end of the flowing, watery first and start of the Baroque-ish second.
• Shostakovich, Symphony No. 14, Op. 135 - I keep wanting to get into this, since (as regular readers know) in general I love Dimitri’s late stuff, especially the Alexander Blok and Marina Tsvetaeva songs. This has so far seemed more, errr, impenetrable. More strident. An additional barrier is that I have the Haitink version, in which the texts are sung in their original languages (or German) and I can’t stand the Herz/Schmerz rhyme in “Loreley”. It reminds me of insipid pop rhymes like: ‘my heart wants to fly/so high in the sky‘. Yeah yeah, I know I’m being ridiculous, but I can’t help myself. I think I’ll listen to Rostropovich or Jansons instead.
• Beethoven, Missa Solemnis, Op. 123 - My first impression of this is: Wow, this is gonna take freakin’ ages to understand. It somehow doesn’t sound very… Beethoveny? Maybe that’s just because it’s full of people singing, which up to this point I completely didn’t associate with Ludwig. The “Kyrie” has been in my head all day.
• Shostakovich, Symphony No. 4, Op. 43 - Ahhh… the classic abandoned at the last minute fourth. It’s probably a good thing he came out with the 5th instead of this, or Stalin would have been royally pissed off. It wanders all over the place, jumping from one mood to another (Mahleresque, I think is how it gets described) and has loads of sonic weirdness and dissonance, and the first example of his tick-tocking percussion finish (used again in the 2nd Cello Concerto and 15th Symphony). I love the grating dissonances in the horns, which sound like bizarre trills, and the flitting between playful melodies and dramatic climaxes in the humongous final movement (27 minutes for Rostropovich, who I prefer to Haitink for this one).

I wonder which of these will morph into favorites…