Articles by Samuel Howes
Computer-Assisted Analysis of Sonority in Fourteenth-Century Motets
Music Theory Online, 2020
ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the distribution of three- and four-voice vertical sonorities in ... more ABSTRACT: This article analyzes the distribution of three- and four-voice vertical sonorities in a repertoire of French ars antiqua and ars nova motets. Rather than selecting the subjectively important sonorities within a piece—an effort that would rely on the analyst’s judgment of the overarching contrapuntal goals—this study uses computational musicological methods to analyze and categorize the distribution of sonorities across individual motets and groups of motets that occur at regular time intervals across the course of the compositions. This study offers some preliminary observations and conclusions about sonority usage in the late medieval French motet repertoire.
KEYWORDS: medieval motets, sonority, digital musicology, Montpellier Codex, Roman de Fauvel, Ivrea Codex
Papers by Samuel Howes
Automatic harmonic analysis is challenging: rule-based models cannot account for every possible e... more Automatic harmonic analysis is challenging: rule-based models cannot account for every possible edge case, and manual annotation is expensive and sometimes inconsistent, undermining the training and evaluation of machine learning models. We present an interactive workflow to address these problems, and test it on Bach chorales. First, a rule-based model was used to generate preliminary, consistent chord labels in order to pre-train three machine learning models. These four models were grouped into an ensemble that generated chord labels by voting, achieving 91.4% accuracy on a reserved test set. A domain expert then corrected only those chords that the ensemble did not agree on unanimously (20.9% of the generated labels). Finally, we used these corrected annotations to re-train the machine learning models, and the resulting ensemble attained an accuracy of 93.5% on the reserved test set, a 24.4% reduction in the number of errors. This versatile interactive workflow can either work i...
In this paper, we describe a workflow of successive corrections on Optical Music Recognition (OMR... more In this paper, we describe a workflow of successive corrections on Optical Music Recognition (OMR) generated MusicXML files and their respective outputs under Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tasks. The original OMR-generated files of six Mendelssohn String Quartets were initially corrected by individual members of this interdisciplinary group, then reviewed by others to further standardize the quality and music analysis priorities of the team. Four MIR tasks are applied to each round of corrections on this collection: cadence detection, chord labeling, key finding, and monophonic pattern discovery. We measure changes in the outputs of these four MIR tasks from one round of corrections to the next in order to evaluate the impact of corrections. Results show that expert revision is more beneficial to some MIR tasks than to others. The resulting corpus of curated MusicXML files is available as an open-source repository under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License fo...
Computer-aided Analysis of Sonority in the French Motet Repertory, ca. 1300–1350
Music Theory Online
This article analyzes the distribution of three- and four-voice vertical sonorities in a repertoi... more This article analyzes the distribution of three- and four-voice vertical sonorities in a repertoire of French ars antiqua and ars nova motets. Rather than selecting the subjectively important sonorities within a piece—an effort that would rely on the analyst’s judgment of the overarching contrapuntal goals—this study uses computational musicological methods to analyze and categorize the distribution of sonorities across individual motets and groups of motets that occur at regular time intervals across the course of the compositions. This study offers some preliminary observations and conclusions about sonority usage in the late medieval French motet repertoire.
Dissertation by Samuel Howes
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree... more A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music Theory
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Articles by Samuel Howes
KEYWORDS: medieval motets, sonority, digital musicology, Montpellier Codex, Roman de Fauvel, Ivrea Codex
Papers by Samuel Howes
Dissertation by Samuel Howes
KEYWORDS: medieval motets, sonority, digital musicology, Montpellier Codex, Roman de Fauvel, Ivrea Codex