And again…
Alright, since the last one went in about as long as the clip lasted for, here’s another for today:
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This time it’s from a 1st movement.
Guessing The Piece Again
Anyone fancy a bit more small-snippet classical music guessing action? This one is about 3 seconds long:
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Here’s a verification hint: it’s from a last movement.
Hot Tuesday Linkage
Janacek would be proud. No, wait a sec, Janácek (check out the text decoration on that bad-boy… except the c doesn’t work properly. Darn.) would be proud. Someone (namely a dude called Ranjit) has a proposal for an installation piece which you can see in the following video:
installation proposal for artbots 2008 from ranjit on Vimeo.
It’s a robot which translates vocal patterns into musical sounds which it performs on a modified electric guitar and various pieces of percussion equipment. In the video linked above you can see how it interprets a brief scene from Citizen Kane. This is exactly the kind of thing that Janacek was into, apparently; trying to mimic the cadences of the human voice using instruments. Except without the electric guitar and microchips. Probably.
Additionally, reader Yvonne forwarded me a recent story about an attempt to geometrically visualize the structure of musical works. As regular readers are probably sick to death of hearing, I’m totally in love with the concept of theoretically-well-grounded visualization techniques. It’s a fairly holy grail. This press piece is tantalizingly light on exact details, but one of the most interesting tidbits for me was:
To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries.
Which I’m a tad suspicious of due to the “certain extent”, and might just mean that they got some pretty pictures which sort of look similar, but could be really neat. If I feel brave enough I’ll try and dig up the actual paper sometime this week and wade through acres of musical and mathematical theory which I do not understand. I can pretend to though. I’m getting really good at that after four years in grad school.
Picking up the pieces
In my last post I wanted to see if anybody could guess a particular classical piece from hearing a single note, the single note in question being:
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Two listeners (Miss M. and ACD) impressively pinned this down to Beethoven almost immediately. Given just a slightly longer rendition of the sample resulted in a correct guess of the particular piece, the part in the presto of Beethoven’s 9th in which — as another commenter, Mitch, described — “it goes from brooding to joyous”.
I find it really interesting trying to determine at which point a series of notes changes from being, well, just a series of notes into being a universally recognizable melody. Everyone reading this probably has a certain section of their brain reserved for that particular theme, but when listening to music when does your brain kick in and scream “I know this!”?
It’s probably not quite here:
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Or here:
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But maybe now?
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It’s particularly fascinating that after listening to the whole theme:
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if you go back and listen to the short ones they seem a lot more obvious. Apparently, consciously knowing which music is about to be played makes your brain give that sharp recognition response with far fewer notes than would ordinarily be needed. Obviously it’s not terribly surprising that you can “recognize” a piece from a single note when you are told what that piece is going to be, but it isn’t just consciously recognizing a piece. It’s not just like someone telling you “you are about to hear the Ode to Joy theme” and you listen to that one note and confirm that indeed, it is the beginning of the theme. When you hear that single note again it is a primal feeling, a low level blast of recognition. Once you know what music the note is from it is almost impossible to avoid that recognition. It’s like trying not to read writing: once you see a written word you instantly identify it with a concept, it’s impossible to see it as just a bunch of lines.
Listening to a new piece of music is sort of like learning a new language. You initially get faced with all these sounds and melodies which you can sort of follow, but don’t have their own bit of brainspace. If you hear the notes which make up the melody one by one, there probably would not be a sudden moment of recognition, they are all just notes because you do not yet understand the piece. They are like a foreign word, which you understand is a word, but you do not have any mental object associated with it. If it were spelled differently you wouldn’t notice. It’s non-meaning would not be affected. In the same way you probably couldn’t tell if one of the notes in the music were altered.
Eventually you get to the stage in which those melodies provoke an instant response. The words make sense. The music has been imprinted into your head in such a way that it has become a piece of you. You can hum the melodies.
I can sort of feel this process happening sometimes. When a piece has first managed to burrow into my head and stake out a bit of territory for itself, I will sometimes have stress dreams in which it is endlessly looping in the background. It’s an almost unpleasant experience, but it’s also almost a given that this music will then become one of my favorite pieces, so all the not-quite-sleep trauma is totally worth it.
Guess the Piece
My last post reminded me of this game they used to play on Radio 1 in the UK where they would play ridiculously short snippets of a song, and people had to phone in and guess what the song was. The amazing thing was that it was surprisingly easy, even though some of the samples lasted for about a fifth of a second. So, does it work with classical? Here’s a half second sample:
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Any takers?
Hopefully Miss M. won’t do me in for stomping into her classical music quiz territory…
EDIT: Heres a slightly extended version:
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