by | August 6, 2012 · 1:00 am

The HandySinger system

The HandySinger system is a personified tool developed to express naturally a singing voice controlled by the gestures of a hand puppet.

The system’s hand puppet consists of a glove with seven bend sensors and two pressure sensors. It sensitively captures the user’s motion as a personified puppet’s gesture. To synthesize the different expressional strengths of a singing voice, the normal (without expression) voice of a particular singer is used as the base of morphing, and three different expressions—“dark”, “whisper”, and “wet”—are used as the target.

This configuration provides musically expressed controls that are intuitive to users. The experiment evaluates whether (1) the morphing algorithm interpolates expressional strength in a perceptual sense, (2) the hand-puppet interface provides gesture data at sufficient resolution, and (3) the gestural mapping of the current system works as planned.

This according to “HandySinger: Expressive singing voice morphing using personified hand-puppet interface” by Tomoko Yonezawa, Noriko Suzuki, Kenji Mase, and Kiyoshi Kogure, an essay included in NIME-05: New interfaces for musical expression (Vancouver : University of British Columbia Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre, 2005).

Below, a perhaps unrelated HandySinger.

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by | August 4, 2012 · 1:00 am

Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana

Libreria Musicale Italiana (LIM) launched the series Quaderni del Centro Studi Canzone Napoletana in 2011 with La canzone napoletana: Le musiche e i loro contesti. Edited by Enrico Careri and Anita Pesce, the book comprises papers presented at the eponymous conference held from 4 through 5 June 2010 at the Casa Murolo-Palazzo Maddaloni, Naples.

Below, Enrico Caruso, who brought canzone napoletana to the world’s attention, sings the genre’s most famous song, Giovanni Capurro and Eduardo di Capua’s O sole mio.

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by | July 30, 2012 · 1:00 am

DayDay MoeMoe’s boingboxes

David Moore (a.k.a. DayDay MoeMoe, a.k.a. Umburkus) is a musician, artist, furniture maker, and visionary hermit hidden away in a secretive corner of a haunted-looking house in the fading Delta cotton town of Rosedale, Mississippi.

The inquisitive, anarchic child of a family that once held considerable sway there, Moore now lives alone in a house covered in vines and filled with his own artwork alongside untold numbers of sweetly unnerving semicollectibles, a trusty dog, and myriad musical instruments and furniture of his own invention, including his signature schizoid zither, a.k.a. buzzstick,  a.k.a. boingbox. The music that he plays with them is unique and unforgettable.

This according to “SoLost: Discovering a visionary hermit musician-artist” by Dave Anderson (Oxford American, 25 July 2012). Below, Umburkus discusses his oeuvre.

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by | July 28, 2012 · 1:00 am

Coloratura tuba

Much vocal music has been transcribed for tuba, but little is available for advanced-level players. Coloratura opera arias offer material that would be challenging for more experienced tubists, and these types of arias are much less text-dependent than other kinds of vocal music.

This according to Guidelines for transcribing coloratura opera arias for tuba, with transcriptions of three arias by Vivaldi, Gluck, and Delibes by Robert Lynn, a 2005 dissertation for Ball State University.

Above, a performance by TubaDiva (Jennifer Paradis-Hagar); below, Alessandro Fossi performs Musetta’s aria “Quando me’n vo” from Puccini’s La Bohème.

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by | July 25, 2012 · 1:00 am

Wagner and Eros

Wagner’s obsession with sexuality prefigured the composition of operas such as Tannhäuser, Die Walküre, Tristan und Isolde, and Parsifal. Daring to represent erotic stimulation, passionate ecstasy, and the torment of sexual desire, Wagner sparked intense reactions from figures like Baudelaire, Clara Schumann, Nietzsche, and Nordau, whose verbal tributes and censures disclose what was transmitted when music represented sex.

Wagner himself saw the cultivation of an erotic high style as central to his art, especially after devising an anti-philosophical response to Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of sexual love. A reluctant eroticist, Wagner masked his personal compulsion to cross-dress in pink satin and drench himself in rose perfumes while simultaneously incorporating his silk fetish and love of floral scents into his librettos. His affection for dominant females and surprising regard for homosexual love likewise enable some striking portraits in his operas.

In the end, Wagner’s achievement was to have fashioned an oeuvre which explored his sexual yearnings as much as it conveyed—as never before—how music could act on erotic impulse.

This according to Wagner and the erotic impulse by Laurence Dreyfus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). Below, Kirsten Flagstad’s historic recording of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde.

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by | July 23, 2012 · 1:00 am

Analyze this!

Analysis of compositions has long been one of the mainstays of Western musicology. What, in turn, are the mainstays of analysis? We recently checked RILM’s database to see which works have inspired the largest numbers of analytical studies.

The hands-down winner is Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier, BWV 846–93, with 112 analyses—perhaps not terribly surprising since the work comprises 48 preludes and fugues, some of which are fiendishly complex. The rest of the top ten are:

2. Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (75 analytical studies)

3. Debussy’s Préludes (45)

4. Bach’s Die Kunst der Fugue, BWV 1080 (31)

5. Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (29)

6. Beethoven’s symphony no. 9, op. 125 (29)

7. Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, op. 21 (27)

8. Mozart’s symphony no. 40, K.550 (26)

9. Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps (23)

10. Schubert’s Die Winterreise, D. 911 (22)

Above, part of the manuscript for Das wohltemperierte Klavier.

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by | July 20, 2012 · 1:00 am

Opera and indoor plumbing

What was the interplay between plumbing and the routines of audience behavior at London’s 18th-century opera house? A simple question, perhaps, but it proves to be a subject with scarce evidence, and even scarcer commentary.

“Pots, privies and WCs: Crapping at the opera in London before 1830” by Michael Burden (Cambridge opera journal XXIII/1–2 [March–July 2011] pp. 27–50) sets out to document as far as possible the developments in plumbing in the London theaters, moving from the chamber pot to the privy to the installation of the first water-closets, addressing questions of the audience’s general behavior, the beginnings in London of a listening audience, and the performance of music between the acts.

Burden concludes that the bills were performed without intervals, and that, in an evening that frequently ran to four hours in length, audience members moved around the auditorium and came and went much as they pleased (to the pot, privy, or WC), demonstrating that singers would have had to contend throughout their performances with a large quantity of low-level noise.

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by | July 18, 2012 · 1:00 am

Routledge studies in music theory

Routledge inaugurated the series Routledge studies in music theory on 3 April 2012 with Music and twentieth-century tonality: Harmonic progression based on modality and the interval cycles by Paolo Susanni and Elliott Antokoletz.

The book explores the web of pitch relations that generates the musical language of non-serialized 12-tone music, and supplies the analytical materials and methods necessary for analyses of a vast proportion of the 20th-century musical repertoire.

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by | July 16, 2012 · 1:00 am

Beethoven does the details

The increasing range of Beethoven’s performance indications paralleled the growing depth of expression in his music. While his predecessors had been content with four basic tempos—adagio, andante, allegro, and presto—he began to add qualifiers, indications of gradual tempo change, and descriptive words and phrases in German.

Still unsatisfied, he began to rely on metronome markings, although he stressed that they only provide a point of departure for a performance in which “feeling also has its beat, which cannot wholly be conveyed by a number”.

He started to favor graphic treatments of crescendo and diminuendo, ensuring dynamic shapes that would not necessarily be intuited by the performer. He used sforzando in structural as well as expressive ways, and expanded volume markings beyond the range from pp to ff.

His pedaling indications usually reinforce harmonic contexts, though sometimes they cause harmonic areas to overlap; this might explain why some of Beethoven’s contemporaries complained that his pedaling resulted in a confused sound. His articulation markings often reinforce motivic structure and development.

All of these performance indications are most fully understood in the context of the particular instrument he was using at the time.

This according to “Interpreting Beethoven’s markings: A preliminary survey of the piano sonatas” by Tallis Barker (The music review LV/3 [August 1994] pp. 169–182). Below, Sviatoslav Richter demonstrates his approach to Beethoven’s performance indications.

More posts about Beethoven are here.

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by | July 13, 2012 · 1:00 am

Dhuns and dentistry

 

A 28-year-old woman urgently needed a tooth extraction, and local anesthesia was not an option.

The patient was offered all of the other anesthetizing options, but she chose music instead. A recording of a Rām dhun (Hindu devotional song for the deity Rāma) was played. The patient did not show any signs of pain or any pain behavior during the extraction procedure, indicating that analgesia was induced through music.

This according to “Extraction of a grossly decayed tooth without local anesthesia but with audio analgesia: A case report” by Manish Bhagania and Anirudha Agnihotry (Music and medicine: An interdisciplinary journal III/4 [October 2011] n.p.). Below, Morari Bapu sings the Rām dhun Hare Rām.

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