Terminology

Dear child has many names. In a call for a special journal issue on music and robotics, I see the use of the word music content processing (MCP). I have been around in the larger music technology community for a while now, but I haven’t really thought of this as a concept in itself before. Using Google as a reference, I see that “music content processing” actually returns 34 100 hits, so obviously it is being used quite extensively. As a comparison, “music information retrieval” (MIR) returns the double (62 100 hits). And here we need to remember that the MIR community has a society and an annual conference to help drive the number of pages. ...

Ok, so I have been discussing the concepts of movement, action and gesture with various people since I posted this entry, and I have come to disagree with myself. Marcelo Wanderley pointed out that an action doesn’t necessarily have to involve a movement, as touch and other types of manipulation should also be considered an action. After all, holding down the keys on a piano after the attack results in no movement, but it is certainly an action. ...

Just to clarify: I am using the term action to denote chunks of movement: Action is thus highly subjective, it is just a mental construct (for either the performer or perceiver, or both) of chunks in the continuous flux of movement. Acknowledging the fact that our brain is working at multiple speeds and resolutions, there could also be actions that are chunks of smaller actions. ...

Ever since I started my PhD project I have been struggling with the word gesture. Now as I am working on a theory chapter for my dissertation, I have had to really try and decide on some terminology, and this is my current approach: I use movement as the general term to describe the act of changing physical position of body parts related to music performance or perception. Action is used to denote goal-directed movements that form a separate unit. This involves perceptual chunking on either the performers and/or the perceiver’s side. ...

I have been struggling with the word gesture for a while. I, and many others in the music cognition/technology community, have been using it to denote music-related actions (i.e. physical body movement). Not only is the term confusing in the musicology community (e.g. the way Hatten writes about inner-musical qualities), but it is also a misleading term in behavioral and linguistics communities, where gesture usually denotes communicative hand movement or facial expressions. ...

For my thesis, I have been thinking a lot about the concept of “salience”. According to Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, salience comes from the Latin word salire that means to leap. The word is used with many connotations in different subjects, but generally it is related to something prominent or significant. Mathematical studies use salience as a term to describe a sudden change in the derivative of a function, as for example in (Large and Palmer 2002). ...