Rhythm is it! MIR beyond onset, beat and tempo.

[Anja Volk]

Rhythm has been demonstrated to be a fundamental characteristic of music in many different contexts of listening and moving to, or creating of music. For instance, seven months old babies are able to distinguish different meters in music (Phillips-Silver & Trainor, 2005), melodies are best recalled when relying on rhythmic features (Sloboda & Parker, 1985; Schulkind et al., 2003) and differentiating between classical musical styles can be done by rhythm only (Dalla Bella & Peretz, 2005).

Yet, there are many open issues on rhythm as a fundamental feature of music and in different musical cultures that can benefit from computational data-rich approaches to music that MIR methods can provide. These go beyond the typical MIR tasks of beat tracking, onset detection, tempo estimation, or dance music classification (which are, without doubt, challenging tasks in themselves). For instance, in the recent “Cross-Disciplinary and Multi-Cultural Perspectives on Musical Rhythm and Improvisation” workshop at NYU Abu Dhabi (Oct 12-15, 2014) many open issues from rhythm research have been discussed, such as rhythmic patterns and underlying metric structures in Ottoman music, in north Indian rupak tal,  in polyrhythmic ensemble playing in Ghanaian dances, or challenges of rhythm in real-time composition systems and in evaluating rhythmic similarity measures. 

We want to use this discussion session as a platform for people working on rhythm in MIR to gather and discuss the following points: 

(1) What are currently typical approaches to rhythm in music in MIR? What research questions have been addressed in what ways, with what data, and with which methodology? What have we achieved?

(2) What research questions on rhythm in music have been overlooked so far in the MIR community that would profit from MIR methods?

(3) How do we envision to establish collaboration with people from musicology, music education, music cognition and other related fields to both feeding back into these areas as well as drawing inspiration from them for our research on rhythm?

 

References

Phillips-Silver & Trainor: Feeling the Beat: Movement Influences Infant Rhythm Perception, 2005

Sloboda & Parker:  Immediate recall of melodies, 1985; 

Schulkind, Posner, Rubin: Musical Features That Facilitate Melody Identification, 2003

Dalla Bella & Peretz: Differentiation of classical music requires little learning but rhythm, 2005