Identifier

etd-11112016-151442

Degree

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

In this thesis, advanced signal processing techniques are proposed to archive the musical scores, guide the novice pianists to play piano with appropriate fingerings, and assess the harmonization for musical composition. The mathematical frameworks for these three applications are established and the corresponding optimization problems are formulated. The optimal solutions are also provided. First, the hard- and soft-archiving approaches for storing and distributing musical scores are investigated. By use of the popular musical scripting language, LilyPond, as the intermediate data format, we propose to encode the LilyPond script, which is converted from the original musical score, to the two-dimensional quick-response (QR) code(s). Instead of using the intuitive conventional image recognition software to recover the original musical score, we propose to benefit from the error-resilient QR codes since they have the inherent error-correction capability. Our proposed hard-archiving scheme based on the LilyPond script and QR codes leads to 100% of musical-score reconstruction accuracy while the conventional method using image recognition can only result in 0% to 80%. Thus, our proposed new scheme is very promising for proving a new robust musical-score archiving method. Second, the comparative study on the automatic fingering, i.e., the computer generated fingering-index sequences for novice pianists, is carried out in this work. Two major approaches, namely rules-based and probabilistic approaches, are investigated. The genetic algorithm as a solution using the rules-based approach and the Viterbi algorithm subject to the hidden Markov models using the probabilistic approach are studied for the automatic fingering optimization. Twelve ergonomic rules are adopted to benchmark the ergonomic compliance of each fingering index sequence. According to the experiments we conduct, the genetic algorithm leads to slightly better performance than the probabilistic approach in terms of ergonomic compliance. On the other hand, the genetic algorithm requires much larger time complexity than the probabilistic approach as the trade-off. Third, the procedure of generating four-part harmonization is investigated. By use of an exhaustive search, we propose a new new algorithm known as the ``Whac-a-Mole'' algorithm. The basic idea is that we tackle the chord with the lowest degree of harmonization with an exhaustive search for each iteration. Our purposed algorithm leads to 16% better efficiency than the method which is to randomly choose a chord to implement exhaustive search.

Date

2016

Document Availability at the Time of Submission

Secure the entire work for patent and/or proprietary purposes for a period of one year. Student has submitted appropriate documentation which states: During this period the copyright owner also agrees not to exercise her/his ownership rights, including public use in works, without prior authorization from LSU. At the end of the one year period, either we or LSU may request an automatic extension for one additional year. At the end of the one year secure period (or its extension, if such is requested), the work will be released for access worldwide.

Committee Chair

Wu, Hsiao-Chun

DOI

10.31390/gradschool_theses.4546

Available for download on Friday, February 21, 2025

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