Organization: The American University
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.emusic-l
Date:         Wed, 29 Jul 1992 11:01:30 EDT
From:         ronin <HARNDEN@AMERICAN.EDU>
Subject:      nets continued
Comments: To: EMUSIC-L@american.edu

ok, this is my last one of the day. i decided not to combine these
three posts, since they really are on pretty different subjects.

you may remember my asking (and my students' asking) recently about neural
nets. we did get some responses, for which we are thankful. clearly, we're
going to have to buy those two books, Music and Connectionism, and The Well
Tempered Object... they seem to be the going texts.
but before i do buy them, let me just lay a little question out, and see
if i can get some naive brainstorming. no references, please... i can find
them myself. i'm interested in what the creative people in this group think
about this...
one of the critical issues in neural network research is that of data
representation. simple kinds of information, such as numeric data of a given
distribution, might be able to be presented to the network 'raw', but the
more complex the information from which one wants to extract features (or
classify, or whatever one is trying to with it), the more pre-processing
is required. after all, most nets consist of but a tiny fraction of the
many layers of highly interconnected units that make up our sensorium,
processing, memory, and other mental systems. lacking these, a comparitively
simple artificial neural network needs to have its input data preprocessed,
perhaps pre- or re-organized for it, as a given cortical region might take
its information not directly from perception, but from prior neural areas.
an example of this lies in image processing, in which one scans the image
in some way more closely resembling the way the eye shifts its attention
around features of interest in a scene, rather than simply handing a
processing network a raw raster scan.
the question, then, is what you might come up with as a way of representing
music. again, i know that this question has been raised, researched, and
published on. and i will look up the results. but i want to know what might
occur to you, not to the formal research community.
so what would you do? how would you represent the patterns that are so clear
to you as a musician or an audience? when looking at a score, your eye does
not see statistical properties. it registers motion, density, uniformity.
midi data does not, to the reader or to the programmer, communicate music
except by several layers of internal translation. and is there a rough
isomorphism between how the eyes and ears interpret the score and the music?
to my mind there is. if i were to describe a music without reference to style,
i would think in terms of motion, density, and uniformity, as well as
consonance, which does not seem to me to be so clear on the page. would i then
represent notes in some manner that preserves something of their relations
(since it the relations among things that defines pattern)? specify an event,
not in terms of its absolute pitch and duration, but in terms of its difference
with respect to the last event? can one encode a macro-structure, a tendency?
and so on.
what do you think?

-----------< Cognitive Dissonance is a 20th Century Art Form >-----------
Eric Harnden (Ronin)
<HARNDEN@AUVM.BITNET> or <HARNDEN@AMERICAN.EDU>
The American University Physics Dept.
4400 Mass. Ave. NW, Washington, DC, 20016-8058
(202) 885-2748
---------------------< Join the Cognitive Dissidents >-------------------
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU