DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTER SCIENCE               
                    UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN DENMARK, ODENSE                   

                             Musical Informatics                             

                             Jens Arnspang et.al.                            
                        DIKU Musical Informatics Group                       
                           University of Copenhagen                          

                    Tuesday, February 6, 2001, at 2:15 PM                    
                               The Seminar Room                              


A new  and  fast  growing field  is  internationally  developing  throughout
computer  science  departments,   acoustics  engineering   laboratories  and
conservatory laboratories, which  from a computer  science point of  view is
termed Musical Informatics.  The motivation  for research in  this new field
lies in the cross section  of the fields of  computer science, computational
acoustics and music.  The latter  have been studied for  thousands of years,
and a  natural  understanding  of  instruments in  terms  of  their  audible
capabilities and treatment  in playing  situations have  been obtained  in a
humaniora sense.

Computer science  as  such  have  in recent  decades  become  interested  in
describing, modelling and coding  various sort of data,  text, images, sound
and music, both  from a  general viewpoint of  data representation  and data
handling, and from specialised and application oriented viewpoints. One such
minor application is the  culture-breaking field of  computer music; another
major and intensively expanding  field is the vast  industry, concerned with
computer assisted  music performance  and  record production  industry.  Yet
other  applications  are  the   numerous  musical  machines,   available  as
commercial products for homes and public organisations throughout society.

The colloquium  will  describe  aspects  of the  growing  field  of  Musical
Informatics  through  examples  of   ongoing  research,  performed   by  the
colloquium group:

-Data structures and algorithms  for classification of styles  and tunes and
for automatic harmonisation.

-Data structures and algorithms for classification and resynthesis of timbre
and virtual instrument control.

-On the role of phase for music perception.

-Databases and library functions for  audio-sonic automatic music literature
retrieval.

-Heuristic algorithms  for recognition  of musical  style,  and elements  of
automatic accompaniment and improvisation.

-Towards  a  correlation  of  drama  notation   and  music  composition  and
performance.

-The MOSART  Project,  a  10.000.000Dkr  EU  funded  effort  within  Musical
Orchestration Systems  in Algorithmic  Research  and Technology,  a  project
defined and  co-ordinated  by  the colloquium  group.  Several  examples  of
industrial support and co-operation are found within this project.


                                                       Host: Kim Skak Larsen