This unique reference book offers a holistic description of the multifaceted field of systematic musicology, which is the study of music, its production and perception, and its cultural, historical and philosophical background. The seven sections reflect the main topics in this interdisciplinary subject. The first two parts discuss musical acoustics and signal processing, comprehensively describing the mathematical and physical fundamentals of musical sound generation and propagation. The complex interplay of physiology and psychology involved in sound and music perception is covered in the following sections, with a particular focus on psychoacoustics and the recently evolved research on embodied music cognition. In addition, a huge variety of technical applications for professional training, music composition and consumer electronics are presented. A section on music ethnology completes this comprehensive handbook. Music theory and philosophy of music are imbedded throughout. Carefully edited and written by internationally respected experts, it is an invaluable reference resource for professionals and graduate students alike.

The future of music archiving and search engines lies in deep learning and big data. Music information retrieval algorithms automatically analyze musical features like timbre, melody, rhythm or musical form, and artificial intelligence then sorts and relates these features. At the first International Symposium on Computational Ethnomusicological Archiving held on November 9 to 11, 2017 at the Institute of Systematic Musicology in Hamburg, Germany, a new Computational Phonogram Archiving standard was discussed as an interdisciplinary approach. Ethnomusicologists, music and computer scientists, systematic musicologists as well as music archivists, composers and musicians presented tools, methods and platforms and shared fieldwork and archiving experiences in the fields of musical acoustics, informatics, music theory as well as on music storage, reproduction and metadata. The Computational Phonogram Archiving standard is also in high demand in the music market as a search engine for music consumers. This book offers a comprehensive overview of the field written by leading researchers around the globe.

"The work of this introductory chapter is twofold; first, to provide a brief historical overview of the changing nature and conception of musical time over the last two thousand years, and second, to set out the arc of the work through detailing the central points of each chapter. While the individual pieces of writing bring vital and varied perspectives from musicology, ethnomusicology, philosophy, psychology, and socio-cultural work, what unites them is their attention to music of the modern period, with a strong focus on the multiplicities of contemporary practice, while also pointing to their nineteenth-century antecedents. In introducing the main themes of the book, the introduction calls attention to the burgeoning scholarship on time in music ranging between the immediate feelings and socialities of being in time with others and the broader imaginings of the cultural politics of time in music"--

How do we understand culture and shape its future? How do we cross the bridge between culture as ideas and feelings and physical, cultural objects, all this within the endless variety and complexity of modern and traditional societies? This book proposes a Physical Culture Theory, taking culture as a self-organizing impulse pattern of electric forces. Bridging the gap to consciousness, the Physical Culture Theory proposes that consciousness content, what we think, hear, feel, or see is also just this: spatio-temporal electric fields. Music is a perfect candidate to elaborate on such a Physical Culture Theory. Music is all three, musical instrument acoustics, music psychology, and music ethnology. They emerge into living musical systems like all life is self-organization. Therefore the Physical Culture Theory knows no split between nature and nurture, hard and soft sciences, brains and musical instruments. It formulates mathematically complex systems as Physical Models rather than Artificial Intelligence. It includes ethical rules for maintaining life and finds culture and arts to be Human Rights. Enlarging these ideas and mathematical methods into all fields of culture, ecology, economy, or the like will be the task for the next decades to come.

Music and Science provides an introduction and practical guidance for a scientific and systematic approach to music research. Students with a background in humanities may find the field hard to tackle and this accessible guide will show them how to consider using an appropriate range of methods, introducing them to current standards of research practices including research ethics, open access, and using computational tools such as R for analysis. These research methods are used to identify the underlying patterns behind the data to better understand how music is constructed and how we are influenced by music. The book focusses on music perception and the experience of music as approached through empirical experiments and by analysing music using computational tools spanning audio and score materials. The process of research, collaboration, and publishing in this area of study is also explained and emphasis is given to transparent and replicable research principles. The book will be essential reading for students undertaking empirical projects, particularly in the area of music psychology but also in digital humanities and media studies.

This book gathers a set of works highlighting significant advances in the areas of music and sound. They report on innovative music technologies, acoustics, findings in musicology, new perspectives and techniques for composition, sound design and sound synthesis, and methods for music education and therapy. Further, they cover interesting topics at the intersection between music and computing, design and social sciences. Chapters are based on extended and revised versions of the best papers presented during the 6th and 7th editions of EIMAD–Meeting of Research in Music, Arts and Design, held in 2020 and 2021, respectively, at the School of Applied Arts in Castelo Branco, Portugal. All in all, this book provides music researchers, educators and professionals with authoritative information about new trends and techniques, and a source of inspiration for future research, practical developments, and for establishing collaboration between experts from different fields.

Despite its importance as a central feature of musical sounds, timbre has rarely stood in the limelight. First defined in the eighteenth century, denigrated during the nineteenth, the concept of timbre came into its own during the twentieth century and its fascination with synthesizers and electronic music-or so the story goes. But in fact, timbre cuts across all the boundaries that make up musical thought-combining scientific and artistic approaches to music, material and philosophical aspects, and historical and theoretical perspectives. Timbre challenges us to fundamentally reorganize the way we think about music. The twenty-five essays that make up this collection offer a variety of engagements with music from the perspective of timbre. The boundaries are set as broad as possible: from ancient Homeric sounds to contemporary sound installations, from birdsong to cochlear implants, from Tuvan overtone singing to the tv show The Voice, from violin mutes to Moog synthesizers. What unifies the essays across this vast diversity is the material starting point of the sounding object. This focus on the listening experience is radical departure from the musical work that has traditionally dominated musical discourse since its academic inception in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Timbre remains a slippery concept that has continuously demanded more, be it more precise vocabulary, a more systematic theory, or more rigorous analysis. Rooted in the psychology of listening, timbre consistently resists pinning complete down. This collection of essays provides an invitation for further engagement with the range of fascinating questions that timbre opens up.

This book presents comprehensive coverage of the latest advances in research into enabling machines to listen to and compose new music. It includes chapters introducing what we know about human musical intelligence and on how this knowledge can be simulated with AI. The development of interactive musical robots and emerging new approaches to AI-based musical creativity are also introduced, including brain–computer music interfaces, bio-processors and quantum computing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology permeates the music industry, from management systems for recording studios to recommendation systems for online commercialization of music through the Internet. Yet whereas AI for online music distribution is well advanced, this book focuses on a largely unexplored application: AI for creating the actual musical content.