Lecture: Music and Operations Research - The Perfect Match
Professor Elaine Chew of the University of Southern California, Viterbi School of Engineering, will deliver this lecture as part of the Operations Research / Management Science Seminar Series. All are invited to attend.
TITLE: Music and Operations Research – The Perfect Match
Abstract: The widespread access to digitally encoded music, from desktop browsers to handheld devices, has given rise to the need for mathematical and computational techniques for generating, manipulating, processing, storing and retrieving digital music. The mathematical nature of music makes it particularly amenable to efficient and effective representation in numerical, and hence digital, form, and to computational modeling to assist in its composing, rendering (as in an expressive performance), and analysis.
Operations research (OR) is a field that prides itself in the mathematical modeling of complex problems to find optimal or feasible solutions. It should come as no surprise that OR has much to offer in terms of solving problems in music composition, analysis, and performance. The problems tackled by operations researchers have ranged from airline yield management and the scheduling of UPS delivery trucks, to mate choice, and ant colony and chicken dominance behavior, so why not music?
In this talk, I will give examples of how musical problems can be framed and solved mathematically and computationally, using techniques familiar to the OR community. Music composition and improvisation can often be thought of as the exploration of a solution space bounded by constraints imposed by the composer or improviser. A music score contains numerous ambiguities the resolution for which can be influenced by a performer, just as the grouping of words in a sentence by a speaker can affect the meaning of a sentence. Thus, performance can be viewed as a set of decisions constrained by the notes in the score.
Music representation and analysis underlie many of the techniques for composition and performance. Music possesses both time structure (meter and rhythm) and pitch structure (tonality or atonality); pitch structures can be further classified into vertical structures (for example, chords) and horizontal structures (for example, melody and voice). Mathematics provides a means to represent and relate these structures one to another, and computational techniques allow us to automatically determine and analyze these structures.
Specific examples will include ESP, the expression synthesis project, MIMI, a multimodal musical improvisation interface, and MuSA.RT, an interactive music analysis and visualization system; ESP is joint work with Jie Liu and Alexandre François, MIMI and MuSA.RT are joint work with Alexandre François.
Click here for more information about Prof. Elaine Chew.
This series is organized by the UMass Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of Finance and Operations Management, and the John F. Smith Memorial Fund.
