News—Fall 2009
Visualizing the Shape of Sound:
A Study of Musical Expression on the Oboe
Mark Bocko (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Dave Headlam (Music Theory), Richard Killmer (Winds, Brass, and Percussion)
The oboe is one of the most expressive voices in western art music. At the Eastman School of Music, we have one of the preeminent oboe teachers in the world, Richard Killmer. His students constitute a unique training ground for study of expression on this distinctive instrument. This project is designed to take advantage of this situation by combining the insights and experience of Killmer and his students with the resources of the "Music Research Lab," a collaborative effort between engineers, computer scientists, and music theorists, in a quantitative exploration into the dimensions of musical expression with the oboe. In the MRL, we have had success in creating physical models of instrument sounds, in studies that required us to determine the smallest number of input variables into the musical system. This experience will be essential to the goals of this project.
Musicians spend years learning to harness the vast resources of human expression through their instruments. The pedagogy of artistic expression is an ongoing project at the Eastman School of Music. We seek to add to the goal of achieving expression by considering the task from a quantitative viewpoint. The question we ask is then - what are the key properties of sound that make it musical and perhaps more to the point, how may these properties and structure of sound best be represented and conveyed? In the initial phase, we will interview and videotape Killmer's lessons, where he uses kinetic directions, musical expressive terms, and metaphor to convey information about expression. With this data, we plan to develop quantitative metrics and visualizations for the sound qualities deemed to be most significant in musical performance and to create a real-time sound analysis and visualization environment in which musicians can explore the structure of their own musical sound. This project will combine signal processing and computer technology with the expertise of a master teacher to develop musically relevant and effective tools. Although initially we are pursuing this program in the context of the oboe, in so doing we will be able to study the expressive qualities common to many musical instruments and to develop a general set of techniques to help a broad range of students of music more efficiently achieve their goals of becoming musical artists.
