Music Theory

In November 1978, tragedy gave rise to an unlikely cultural force. As mourners gathered on the steps of San Francisco City Hall after the assassination of Harvey Milk, a group began to sing. From that candlelight vigil emerged the first officially gay chorus—and a choral movement that wove together community, activism, and artistry. Discover how GLBT choruses unified a generation, spread from coast to coast, and continue building bridges through song.

Creativity and computation are often seen as opposites, yet they converge powerfully in co-creative music improvisation. This article rethinks the divide, showing how computational agents and human musicians partner through listening-while-performing, distributed cognition, and shared creative outcomes. It reveals that both human and computational creativity can contribute to a common ecological context, making machines true partners in spontaneous musical expression rather than mere tools.

Free improvisation has long helped music therapy clients express the unspoken—but measuring progress in that spontaneous moment has remained a subjective tangle. New computational modeling now captures emergent behaviors in real-time across six therapist-led sessions, tracking note colors, octave transitions, pedal presses, and crescendos to deliver objective growth metrics. The results reveal quantifiable leaps in expressiveness that human records often miss entirely.

What happens when listeners apprehend meaning beneath the surface of notes — and can a machine recover that depth? This article connects three domains: AI-driven music theory, music as a computational object, and music through the lens of linguistics. At the core is a deceptively simple idea: equivalence relations.

Human improvisation requires real-time creativity, technique, and communication. Building computers that partner in that dialogue demands formalizing complex musical judgment into code. This investigation maps existing computational improvisers, from live-coding environments to corpus-based systems, revealing how creative agency emerges—and why human perception of machine autonomy is vital to the musical outcome.

How can a computer listen to a live performer, follow a score, and synchronize an accompaniment in real time? This article dives into five foundational Music Understanding projects: score following and accompaniment, polyphonic matching, blues improvisation following, rhythm understanding through beat tracking, and an intelligent Piano Tutor that diagnoses student errors.

Computer music composition systems have evolved from mainframes to personal computers, and now the cloud. Building on decades of algorithmic tools and the EvMusic representation, a new architecture taps Cloud Computing, web services, and the MusicJSON exchange format. Discover how composers can work online through a browser — composing, editing, and rendering scores without local infrastructure. A paradigm shift for computer-aided composition.

A year-long Hong Kong secondary school study put 44 students at iMac workstations, composing in both classical and popular styles using Sibelius and Logic Pro. You won't believe how a computer-based composition cycle using a "de-composition and re-composition" method turned everything on its head. Here's why student engagement soared and what the study says about combining music tradition with music technology.

What happens when Lorraine Hunt Lieberson becomes Dido in your imagination? It’s not random—it’s a precise mental operation called conceptual blending, and it may be the key to understanding musical creativity. This article unpacks how conceptual integration networks blend a singer’s identity with a tragic queen from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, generating something entirely new. Building on the foundational work by Fauconnier and Turner, we trace how composition, completion, and elaboration produ

Over 130 years after Edison’s phonograph, Croatia’s art music recordings are scattered across state archives, radio stations, and private collections with no coordinated preservation plan. Despite laws requiring protection, rare shellac discs decay in climate-unfit rooms and digital transfers are tailored for commercial broadcasting. Meet the small band of determined enthusiasts—backed by the Austrian Phonogrammarchiv—who are applying for EU funding to create a national sound archive before it’s