17 articles in this issue
Daniel Shanahan
No abstract available.
Derek R. Strykowski
Text painting is a defining characteristic of the sixteenth-century madrigal style, especially in association with references to height. Whereas composers cannot have given musical illustration to every such reference contained within the text of a madrig... see more
Craig Sapp
This commentary provides multiple suggestions for future research on text painting that have been inspired by Strykowski's (2016) quantitative analysis of height-related musical imagery. For example, musical features such as meter, harmony, and position m... see more
Nathaniel Condit-Schultz
This paper describes a new digital corpus of rap transcriptions known as the Musical Corpus of Flow (MCFlow). MCFlow currently contains transcriptions of verses from 124 popular rap songs, performed by 86 different rappers, containing a total of 374 verse... see more
Mitchell Ohriner
In this commentary, I highlight some of the novel contributions of Nathaniel Condit-Schultz's "MCFlow: A Digital Corpus of Rap Transcriptions" and discuss issues of rhyme definition, sampling and corpus construction, feature representation, and historical... see more
Recent years have seen the rise of musical corpus studies, primarily detailing harmonic tendencies of tonal music. This article extends this scholarship by addressing a new genre (rap music) and a new parameter of focus (rhythm). More specifically, I use ... see more
This commentary offers a review of Ohriner's corpus-based research on rap music, and includes an in-depth comparison of Ohriner's model with my own. It highlights multiple divergences in our underlying methodologies, and outlines the potential impact of s... see more
Jacob J Gran
This commentary compares and contrasts the two articles within this issue that describe a corpus-based approach to rap music (Condit-Schultz, 2016; Ohriner 2016). Beyond their technical differences, these studies mutually converge on the concept of "flow"... see more
Fernando Benadon
Working with an original corpus of Afro-Cuban drumming recordings shared by Andrew McGraw, I examine the nature and extent of non-simultaneous attacks between ensemble players. Quantitative analyses of ~30,000 drum onset times in four- and five-player per... see more
Peter Martens
Fernando Benadon (2016) shines a strong objective light onto slight but noticeable timing perturbations in Afro-Cuban drumming practice, coining the term near-unisons to describe non-simultaneous attacks that are perceived as such, but that are also ... see more
Steven Craig Cannon
This paper presents an analytical survey of 283 symphonies dating from 1800-1899. Features of full symphonies include the rate of compositional output over the course of the century, the number, order, and keys of movements, and the prevalence of sonata f... see more
Ben Duane
This commentary compares observational corpus analysis and hypothesis-driven analytical methods, and discusses the methods used in Cannon's "Sonata Form in the Nineteenth-Century Symphony" article.
Joseph R Daniele
The development of musical style across time and geography is of particular interest to historians and musicologists, yet quantitative evidence to support these trends has been lacking. This paper illustrates a novel application of the nPVI ('normalized p... see more
Leigh VanHandel
This response offers an alternate interpretation for the data described in Joseph Daniele's 2016 article "A tool for the quantitative anthropology of music: Use of the nPVI equation to analyze rhythmic variability within long-term historical patterns in m... see more
This article is in response to Leigh VanHandel's "The War of the Romantics: An Alternate Hypothesis Using nPVI for the Quantitative Anthropology of Music." (2016) I address comments made in VanHandel's response and propose a new tool, the "rhythmic finger... see more
David Huron,Caitlyn Trevor
String instruments may be played either with open strings (where the string vibrates between the bridge and a hard wooden nut) or with stopped strings (where the string vibrates between the bridge and a performer's finger pressed against the fingerboard).... see more
Daniel Müllensiefen
This commentary offers a review of Huron and Trevor's article on the relationship between the likelihood of a composition and performance using stopped strings, and its overall sadness.