Mining Characteristic Patterns for Comparative Music Corpus Analysis

A core issue of computational pattern mining is the identification of interesting patterns. When mining music corpora organized into classes of songs, patterns may be of interest because they are characteristic, describing prevalent properties of classes, or because they are discriminant, capturing distinctive properties of classes. Existing work in computational music corpus analysis has focused on discovering discriminant patterns. This paper studies characteristic patterns, investigating the behavior of different pattern interestingness measures in balancing coverage and discriminability of classes in top k pattern mining and in individual top ranked patterns. Characteristic pattern mining is applied to the collection of Native American music by Frances Densmore, and the discovered patterns are shown to be supported by Densmore’s own analyses.

Pitch vs. Timbre

Early comparative musicology habitually ignored, even extinguished, timbre in its single-minded focus on pitch. This chapter traces the broader social, cultural, and political consequences of this framework. It surveys how, at the turn of the twentieth century, John Comfort Fillmore and Benjamin Ives Gilman followed the lead of Alice Fletcher and Alexander Ellis in deploying a broad range of technologies—phonograph, Helmholtz resonator, keyboard, and musical notation—to develop frameworks for analyzing essential similarities and differences between Native American and Western musics. It argues that such scholarship, while ostensibly aimed at salvaging Native American music, also served American efforts to reform and silence indigenous voices. The postscript examines the resonances between their theories and modern frameworks of parametric analysis that construe pitch and timbre as autonomous, and proposes that there may be unrecognized perils in overly articulating the boundaries between pitch and timbre to focus analytical attention exclusively on the measurable quantities of musical sound.

Identification and Description of Outliers in the Densmore Collection of Native American Music

This paper presents a method for outlier detection in structured music corpora. Given a music collection organised into groups of songs, the method discovers contrast patterns which are significantly infrequent in a group. Discovered patterns identify and describe outlier songs exhibiting unusual properties in the context of their group. Applied to the collection of Native American music collated by Frances Densmore (1867–1957) during fieldwork among several North American tribes, and employing Densmore’s music content descriptors, the proposed method successfully discovers a concise set of patterns and outliers, many of which correspond closely to observations about tribal repertoires and songs presented by Densmore.

Intercultural Understanding of Music for Kyosei Living

Music has the power to connect people of distance and differences. Music education can facilitate this process. However, it can also develop cultural misunderstanding and prohibit the acceptance of others. This chapter introduces a negative case of multicultural music education in an American primary school to make sense of an intercultural misunderstanding in music that fails to achieve kyosei living in multicultural society. A detailed case study sheds light on the ways in which a music teacher facilitated students' cultural misunderstanding by teaching multicultural music from a European viewpoint, ignoring culture-specific contexts of practicing and appreciating music. Two examples of multicultural music taught in the class were Japanese and Native American music. Each will be examined from a culture-bearer's and ethnomusicologist's perspectives. Instead of criticizing the teacher's approach, the author analyzes why and how it happened within the context of the teacher.

Dancing “Between the Break Beats”

This chapter examines the contributions of hip-hop art forms to contemporary urban thought and cultural expression among Native Americans. It argues that the infusion of hip-hop art forms such as b-boying and b-girling within Native communities, arose from struggle and a need for a movement that would both represent and inspire social change. Ialso explore the appeal of hip-hop for Native youth, the concept of “Indigenous motion,” and the significance of dancing “between the break beats.” Finally, this chapter discusses the roles of resistance, struggle, and the dismantling of colonialism within the collective voices of Native hip-hop artists. In particular, it considers how A Tribe Called Red (ATCR), a Native American music and video collective, disseminates Native sounds and images both aurally and visually via virtual fan communities on YouTube.