The Pareto Software: A Journey through the Music of the Bedzan Pygmies -- Fabien Levy

October 19, 2009 by jmukai

Tuesday, December 1 at 4pm in 701C, Center for Ethnomusicology
Fabien Levy
The Pareto Software: A Journey through the Music of the Bedzan Pygmies... and through the World of Ethnomusicology
Abstract:
Pareto ["Patchs d'Analyse et de Resynthèse des Echelles dans les musiques de Tradition Orale" / patches of pitch-scale analysis and re-synthesis in the music of oral tradition] is a set of patches made for the software Open Music by IRCAM which offers three functions:

1) To transcribe an acoustic signal into musical information

2) To propose various statistical tools to help to determine the musical scale

3) To directly change or adjust the musical signal through new scales in order to validate or refute the results

This software has been computed for a CNRS/IRCAM mission in Cameroon in July/August 2000, to study musical scales of Bedzan Pygmies and Tikar repertoire (with the ethnomusicologists N. Fernando&F. Marandola, under the scientific direction of Simha Arom).

After the presentation of this software and its use in ethnomusicology, I will share my experience of this research project from a composer's perspective.

Permalink