Musical Contrast and Similarity

Topic Description

Similarity and contrast play key roles in many genres of music. Similarity has been much studied, but contrast has had little attention.

The project will investigate the relationship between the subjective experience of contrast (and similarity), statistical features of scores, and musicological writings.

Skills Required:

• Programming skills e.g. Python, Lisp, Java
• Understanding of key musical concepts e.g. melody, harmony, structure
• Statistics useful
• Cognitive aspects of music psychology useful

Background Reading:

Laney, Robin; Samuels, Robert and Capulet, Emilie (2015). Cross entropy as a measure of musical contrast. In: Collins, Tom; Meredith, David and Volk, Anja eds. Mathematics and Computation in Music. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (9110). Cham, Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, pp. 193–198. https://oro.open.ac.uk/view/person/rcl46.html