Artikeln presenterar musikaliska egenskaper i traditionell fäbodmusikens i Sverige, med fokus på vallmusikens tonalitét, melodik och form. Artikeln sammanfattar ny forskning i fäbodmusikens tonspråk på ett enkelt sätt och nya rön baserade på unika  korpusstudier med metoder hämtade från modern kognitiv musikforskning ställs i relation till tidiga musikvetenskapliga studier av ämnet.

Abstract Melody beyond notes - a study of melody cognition Keywords: Melody, Cognition, Melodic segmentation, Melodic Parallelism, Pitch Structure,

Meter, Rhythm, Grouping, Swedish Folk Music, Music Theory, Computer-aided analysis This thesis is a music theoretical approach to cognition of surface structure in monophonic melodies. It can briefly be described as a study into what extent we may acquire a common experience of melodic structure, such as phrase structure, only from listening to a melody. More precisely, this work concerns the question as to whether a cognitively based method of analysis can provide analyses of melodic surface structures in different styles that

will concur with listeners’ conceptions better than chance. In order to investigate this question a general model of melody cognition was

developed, relying primarily on a few general cognitive principles. The model was designed to be general in the sense that it should apply to any style for which the concept of melody is relevant. This model provided the framework for a computer-aided method of analysis, which performs analysis of different aspects of melodic surface structure based on information of relative pitch and temporal information only. These aspects involve: Categorical perception of pitch and duration at basic levels, such as context-sensitive quantization and melodic pitch categorization; Analysis of metrical and non-metrical temporal structures, e,g. heterometric structures; phrase and section structure, including analysis of structural implications of melodic similarity, structural hierarchy and symmetry. This development has required new theoretical concepts and methods to be created, e.g. regarding the relationship between rhythm and meter, some of which are presented for the first time is this thesis.

In order to evaluate the performance of the model a series of listener tests were performed, which together with corpuses of musical notations from different styles, constituted the reference material of the study. This material has included Scandinavian folk music styles and Western classical music, but also examples of Eastern European folk music, Middle East and Indian Classical music, Jazz and Western popular song.

The results of these tests indicated that melody can be conceived differently by people even within a limited cultural sphere. But the results also suggested that this variability is possible to model by a rule-based method of analysis, since the predictions given by the model generally were well above chance level. It is herein suggested that variability in grouping conception to a considerable degree can be accounted for in terms of start- and end-oriented grouping preference. Moreover, the results also indicate that important aspects of even culturally foreign music can be conveyed, also in limited melodic stimuli.

Generally, the results support the assumption of a general cognitive framework for melodic surface structure. This might be interpreted as to indicate that, metaphorically speaking; melody may indeed be a universal ‘language’, but one which we all understand in our own way.

MITIS – Musical Informational Technology in School

The aim of the MITIS - project is to explore possibilities to create interactive teaching materials where new technology is used to distribute knowledge about musical structure (i.e. notation) as well as content in an interactive and creative way. This is carried out as a collaborative project between a group of music teachers, the company DoReMir, and researchers and staff from the Institution for Folk Music and the Institution for Music, Pedagogics and Society at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.

The core foundation of the project is literacy in music – for example reading and writing notation (Asmus, 2004). Notation is for most musicians an important tool to use both for taking part of, interpreting, documenting and pass music on (Hultberg, 2000). In connection with the digitalization of society and digital tools to do things such as interpreting, documenting and pass music on made available to a broader public, traditional notation has got a more hidden place in music education in schools. In the Swedish curricula for the compulsory School, notation is explicitly mentioned in 1969. In the later Curricula’s, different kind of notation is mentioned, but not as explicitly as in earlier years (Skolöverstyrelsen, 1969; Skolverket, 2019). This also aligns with the development of society as a whole, and with the strategy for digitalization that was established by the Swedish government in 2017 (Regeringen, 2017) and can be seen as a development towards a wider view on different forms of notation. However, in the aesthetic program for the upper secondary school, reading traditional notation on a basic level, is required in the Curricula (Skolverket, 2020). Furthermore, to get access to higher music education in Sweden, the skill of reading traditional notation, is required. We argue therefore, that to increase music literacy, also in regard to reading notation, can be seen as an democratic issue. To make learning notation available and possible in an easy and digitalized way, with devices available to pupils in school, may be an important step to advance possibilities for every child to access higher music education.

An important part of the project is to develop and support learning and interpretation of notation in different creative ways. One of the starting points for this project is the technique for digital music interpretation that has been developed by DoReMir Music Research AB. This technique has been used in an app called Notysing, for learning to read and sing traditional notation with a digital device such as a reading tablet or mobile phone. The project has been running since 2018. The first year the focus was to develop the app, test it within a small group of music teachers, and ensure good technical quality as well as pedagogical foundations for the design. In 2019 testing started in compulsory as well as in upper secondary School in Sweden, with focus on gathering qualitative data through a digital survey in the app. During autumn 2020 a qualitive study has been conducted, and in-depth interviews are in progress. Pupils in San Diego has been included in 2020, also as a part of finding new teaching strategies for distance education during the Covid19 pandemic. It has been developed and tested with over 200 pupils and music teachers.

Preliminary results suggest that pupils and music teachers are positive to learn notation through an app that uses gamification to enhance and motivate learning, and that issues that arise are mostly technical, and that the equipment of the schools, and technical skills ana knowledge of the music teacher are crucial for success. Furthermore, the results indicate that regards must be taken to

different systems for managing IT in different schools and municipalities. Last but not least, there are great school-cultural differences in how schools work with notation in San Diego and in Sweden, which once again raises questions about how to work with it in our context, and also, why we work with it the way we currently do.

References

Asmus, E. P. (2004). Music Teaching and Music Literacy. Journal of Music Teacher Education, 13(2), 6–8. https://doi.org/10.1177/10570837040130020102

Hultberg, C. (2000). The Printed Score As a Mediator of Musical Meaning – Approaches to Musical notation on Western Tonal Tradition. [Doctoral thesis, Malmö Academy of Music].

Regeringen. (2017). Nationell digitaliseringsstrategi för skolväsendet. Utbildningsdepartementet: Bilaga till regeringsbeslut I:1, 2017-10-19.

Skolöverstyrelsen. (1969). Läroplan för grundskolan 1 Allmän del. Utbildningsförlaget

Skolverket (2019). Läroplan för grundskolan, förskoleklassen och fritidshemmet 2011. Reviderad 2019. Skolverket. Skolverket.( 2020). https://www.skolverket.se/undervisning/gymnasieskolan/laroplan-program-och-amnen-i-gymnasieskolan/gymnasieprogrammen/amne?url=1530314731%2Fsyllabuscw%2Fjsp%2Fsubject.htm%3FsubjectCode%3DMUS%26courseCode%3DMUSINS01S%26tos%3Dgy&sv.url=12.5dfee44715d35a5cdfa92a3#anchor_MUSINS01

This paper makes several contributions to automatic lyrics transcription (ALT) research. Our main contribution is a novel variant of the Multistreaming Time-Delay Neural Network (MTDNN) architecture, called MSTRE-Net, which processes the temporal information using multiple streams in parallel with varying resolutions keeping the network more compact, and thus with a faster inference and an improved recognition rate than having identical TDNN streams. In addition, two novel preprocessing steps prior to training the acoustic model are proposed. First, we suggest using recordings from both monophonic and polyphonic domains during training the acoustic model. Second, we tag monophonic and polyphonic recordings with distinct labels for discriminating non-vocal silence and music instances during alignment. Moreover, we present a new test set with a considerably larger size and a higher musical variability compared to the existing datasets used in ALT literature, while maintaining the gender balance of the singers. Our best performing model sets the state-of-the-art in lyrics transcription by a large margin. For reproducibility, we publicly share the identifiers to retrieve the data used in this paper.

This paper proposes a deep convolutional neural network for performing note-level instrument assignment. Given a polyphonic multi-instrumental music signal along with its ground truth or predicted notes, the objective is to assign an instrumental source for each note. This problem is addressed as a pitch-informed classification task where each note is analysed individually. We also propose to utilise several kernel shapes in the convolutional layers in order to facilitate learning of timbre-discriminative feature maps. Experiments on the MusicNet dataset using 7 instrument classes show that our approach is able to achieve an average F-score of 0.904 when the original multi-pitch annotations are used as the pitch information for the system, and that it also excels if the note information is provided using third-party multi-pitch estimation algorithms. We also include ablation studies investigating the effects of the use of multiple kernel shapes and comparing different input representations for the audio and the note-related information.

Stylistic Feature Mapping for Music Performance 

In the late 1970s, the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (KMH) started professional performance programs for musicians outside the domain of Western Classical Music, including e.g. Jazz and Swedish Folk music. In the beginning, it was regarded an opportunity for informally trained musicians in these genres to receive proper music education. 

However, it soon became clear that these students, in order to develop their artistic practice within their own genres within the domain of academic music performance training, needed terminology, concepts and methods for to describe the values, aesthetics, expressions, musical structures, instrumental techniques etc. of importance in their musical practice. 

In the clash between musical styles developed outside of the music academies and the art music with its rich history of prescriptive descriptive concepts, there was a need for communication of expressional qualities between different musical styles – and this need for revealing the tacit knowledge of non- academic performers were in particular prominent in Folk Music. An artistic research project was initiated, conducted between 1983 and 1987 (Ahlbäck 1987), with the aim to study, document and describe performance style and techniques in Swedish fiddle music from a performance perspective, however making style comparisons possible. 

One outcome of the project was a system for description and mapping of performance style qualities, and this ‘style mapping model’ originally developed for fiddle music emerged into a more general model for describing performance style qualities that has been used in artistic reflective training and in thesis work at KMH for more than 30 years, as a tool for developing, describing, documenting and communicating artistic directions and concepts. 

This paper discusses the features of this model in relation to musicological and music psychological approaches to music expression and style and presents empirical results from the application of the system within performance training for over 30 years including over 250 students, as well as examples of influences on contemporary musical practice. 

How has this approach been used for development of musical concepts in different artistic reflective works? What can be learned from applying this mapping system in the meeting between musicians with different musical values? 

”We hear what we know” - On the power of conceptsand how traditional fiddle music in contemporary society can benefit fromfolk music theorySwedish fiddle music, just as many other fiddle traditions, has a strong connection to dance. Making people want to move their feet is one of the chief tasks ofthe fiddler, and this connection still influences the music today, even thoughthe music might be played on concert stages or be digitally streamed.So what constitutes this knowledge of the fiddler? What is important when playing a certain local styleof Swedish polska so people actually can dance to it?    If you live in an isolated community with no contact with the outside world you might not have to reflect on what is the stylistic features of your tradition but today folk music generally lives in a multi-stylistic world where different value systemsthat originates from other music traditions than fiddle music dominates. Today’s fiddlers will have to relate to today’s world of music, whether we want it or not.In Sweden, since the 19th century, there has been a tradition of mystifying the knowledge of the fiddler, making the competence of playing a matter of socio-cultural background,  geography and ancestry.The perils of this view is that the qualities of  art of fiddling might be obscuredand  actually might be lost when music transforms - as music always do.In this talk Sven Ahlbäck, who is a traditional fiddler deeply rooted in traditional Swedish FolkMusic and very involved in development of new ensemble playing and teaching, will talkabout how conceptualising stylistic qualities of Swedish fiddle music such as e.g.asymmetrical beats, swing, bowing and intonation have influenced the developmentof today’s Swedish folk music, even beyond the fiddle.

Many AI applications on music relates to music theoretical models, in the sense of musical concepts and ideas of how music works, that are not always made explicit, explicitly discussed or questioned. Already the choice of representations of music and sound as well as the selection of data for training models can influence models and creative output greatly. Here we will give some examples of problems arising when modelling basic musical features, from the experience of developing  automatic music notation.

When I studied to become a musician on my instruments violin and nyckelharpa at the Department of Folk Music at the Royal College of Music (KMH) in Stockholm. Musikhögskolan (KMH) in Stockholm, I wrote an artistic bachelor thesis in music. In the thesis, I made a style analysis between the Näck-tuned melodies of Tyska klockorna performed by Pelle Björnlert, Gustaf Wetter and Pär Näsbom. The analysis included a comparison between these fiddlers and musicians with history and notation. I studied their melodies, rhythms, harmonies, tempos, moods, stringing, phrasing, dynamics and sound. I also studied and compared their emotions/values, contextual associations, expression, musical structure, performance/technique and general conditions in three different stylistic mappings between these fiddlers and musicians. At the oral presentation, I performed these three melodies of the Tyska klockorna on my violin, playing as close to Björnlert, Wetter and Näsbom's playing styles as possible.

My twin sister Caroline Eriksson and I studied at KMH at the same time. When we started our degree projects, a graduation concert was included. We chose to have a joint “Sister Concert”, where two graduation concerts became one. The concert reflects the years before KMH, the years during KMH and the years after KMH. A varied concert with 24 fantastic fellow musicians and dancers, where we performed the music that is very close to us, both traditional and newly written, with a focus on interaction, play to dance and dance to play.

Sammanfattning 

Efter att ha skrivit biografin om Mohamad Abdelkarim och analyserat hans olika stilar genom att skriva noter till melodierna så har jag förstått ännu mer varför Mohamad anses vara en av dem som genom historien haft bäst teknik och känsla för sitt instrument, Bizq. Han behärskade instrumentet och var väldigt självsäker i sin musik. Han hade rest runt, bekantat sig med många olika kulturer och tagit influsenser av respektive kultur, vilket gör honom till en unikt mångsidig instrumentalist och komponist. Jag har lärt mig mycket teknik om instrumentet genom att försöka spela låtarna som Mohamad gjorde. 

1974 publicerades boken The Teaching of Action in String Playing av Paul Rolland. Boken re- dovisade ett forskningsprojekt där man visade att rörelseträning, skapad för att befria ele- ven från överdriven spänning, på lång sikt kommer att resultera i snabbare inlärning och bättre utförande i frågan om att spela fiol. I bokens teorikapitel redovisas principerna för effektiva och avspända rörelser i samband med fiolspel. I det forskningsprojekt som utgör grunden för föreliggande uppsats, var avsikten att göra förberedande undersökningar för att så småningom kunna studera hur man kan överföra dessa principer till spel på nyckelhar- pa.En stor del av arbetet ägnades åt att utveckla en bra metod för att, medelst videofilmning, studera hur nyckelharpsspelare rör sig, samt att strukturera och klassificera de olika rörelser spelaren utför. Detta utvecklingsarbete resulterade i en plan över vilka rörelser som ska studeras och från vilka vinklar dessa ska filmas, samt konkret material, i form av listor och protokoll, som ska användas vid vidare studier. En liten del av tiden äg- nades också att åt att fundera hur modern videoteknik kan användas för att manipulera de färdiga filmerna, t.ex. med användandet av ultrarapid och grafiklager, i syfte att åskådlig- göra de rörelser som studeras.Ett urval av rörelserna i den fullständiga planen filmades och studerades se- dan. Dessa är instrumenthållning (som kan betraktas som en rörelse på så vis att den inne- bär ett balanserande av instrumentet), helkroppsrörelse i stående samt sittande position, samt start- och avslutningsrörelser. Fem stycken professionella spelare filmades och stude- rades. Deras rörelsemönster kunde sedan, i viss mån, jämföras med ett privat material med inte lika skickliga spelare. Generellt kunde en klar koppling ses mellan spelskicklighet och rörelsemönster, på så vis att de skickliga spelarnas rörelser i högre grad ansluter sig till de principer som redogörs för i Paul Rollands bok.En specialist på biomekanik konsulterades också, för att diskutera de olika spelarnas rörelsebeteenden. Denna konsultation resulterade i att författarens iakttagelser bekräftades och underbyggdes med konkreta fakta om människans rörelseapparat.

Hear Color and See Sound - What happens when I combine flamenco guitar and film in a live performance?

This master thesis explores the combination of two art forms. The purpose is to use live projections to enhance my guitar composition with movie. My research question is: what happens when I combine flamenco guitar and film in a live performance? I explore if visual qualities add a deeper meaning to my instrumental music by experimenting with color science and video telling/editing techniques. I’ve tested through surveys and live performances if the audience perceive my music differently, by showing contrasting footage or footage that synchronize with my musical compositions. Resulting in an exam concert where I control the prerecorded video compositions with a touch screen interface through the video-jockey software Resolume, while also performing the music (which have been timed for the videos) live together with a flamenco singer and dancer.

"Det skriftliga stilanalysarbetet är en liten del av mitt sökande efter den azerbajdzjanska musikstilen och dess skalor och modus. Examenskonsert-ljudfilen och den skriftliga reflektionen tillhör det praktiska examensarbetet."

Audio-to-lyrics transcription and alignment requires strong acoustic and language models that are trained on in-domain data and a well-adapted pronunciation model for singing. Even in the presence of such models, the length of audio segments for decoding remains a challenge. In this year’s MIREX submission, we present a recursive search method that splits the audio with respect to anchor- ing words for performing alignment on shorter audio seg- ments. The recursive is applied through gradually restrict- ing the language model and search space after each search iteration. We apply a final pass of forced alignment on the segmented audio to obtain timings for every word in the input song lyrics. According to the initial experiments, our system is robust to various musical genre while being executable on local machines with low memory and com- putational resources.

Speech recognition is a well developed research field so that the current state of the art systems are being used in many applications in the software industry, yet as by today, there still does not exist such robust system for the recognition of words and sentences from singing voice. This paper proposes a complete pipeline for this task which may commonly be referred as automatic lyrics transcription (ALT). We have trained convolutional time-delay neural networks with self-attention on monophonic karaoke recordings using a sequence classification objective for building the acoustic model. The dataset used in this study, DAMP - Sing! 300x30x2 [1] is filtered to have songs with only English lyrics. Different language models are tested including MaxEnt and Recurrent Neural Networks based methods which are trained on the lyrics of pop songs in English. An in-depth analysis of the self-attention mechanism is held while tuning its context width and the number of attention heads. Using the best settings, our system achieves significant improvement to the state-of-the-art in ALT and provides a new baseline for the task.

Sånger med en särskild funktion har alltid intresserat mig. Jag fascineras över att rösten på olika sätt kan användas i en vardaglig kontext, där ett ändamål står i centrum. Musiken blir ett verktyg, ett sätt att underlätta ett arbete eller en syssla. Det finns i vallvisornas lock på djur, i arbetssångernas taktfasta ramsor - och inte minst, i vaggvisorna. Jag kan inte minnas första gången jag blev bekant med begreppet Fiskeskärsmelodin. Troligen var det någon gång när jag nyss påbörjat mina eftergymnasiala studier i folkmusik. Melodin i sig har jag dock med mig sedan barnsben, långt innan jag visste att den kallades för just fiskeskärsmelodin. Det finns ett antal kända vaggvisor, till exempel Evert Taubes Byssan Lull och C.M. Bellmans Vaggvisa för min son Carl, som bygger på fiskeskärsmelodins säregna struktur.

I denna studie som berör vokal skandinavisk folkmusik ämnar jag att hålla ett enkelt och generellt språk, men det kan förekomma begrepp som kräver en viss förkunskap inom ämnet. Jag kommer referera till fiskeskärsmelodin på olika sätt, ibland med begreppet fiskeskärsvisa och i ett analytiskt sammanhang med begreppet fiskeskärsvariant eller enbart variant. Ordet traditionsbärare förekommer även det frekvent, och används när jag refererar till en eller fler av de fyra sångare jag valt att analysera.

Abstract 

The purpose of the thesis was to immerse myself in a written style analysis with notation, history and contemporaneity. I have compared four different fiddlers who play slängpolska from eastern Södermanland. An older sound recording with Gustaf Wetter from 1966 was an addition for the historical part. The present was represented by Leif Johansson, Christina Frohm and Ulf Lundgren which I recorded as solo recordings in 2012. Through the recordings I could immerse myself in melody, rhythm, harmony and sound. The process would then lead to me performing a solo at the graduation concert with the tune that all the contemporary fiddlers played. I played the similarities and differences between the variations that the three fiddlers made of the same tune: Slängpolska after Axel Axelsson from Östtorp and Anders Andersson from Lästringe in Södermanland, Sweden. Then I added my own way of playing the tune as a further variation. The result shows that there is a certain similarity between all four of us in rhythm and expression. Environment and heritage have an impact on our way of playing since the tradition goes from fiddler to fiddler. Therefore, the slängpolskan is played in a way typical for eastern Södermanland. It is also noted that the same slängpolska can be played with great variation as it is a type of tune that is permissive and durable in terms of style. Each fiddler is unique and therefore there are both similarities and differences in style. 

The graduation concert was done together with my twin sister Madliene Ahlström Eriksson and therefore the title of the concert was "Sister Concert". We wanted to make two graduation concerts into a joint concert and with two acts including an intermission. We wanted to create a varied concert with everything from solos to twenty-six musicians and dancers on stage at the same time. We chose music that is close to both Madliene and me. Both traditional and newly written with a focus on interplay, play to dance and dance to play. The concert reflected the years before Kungl. Musikhögskolan (KMH), the time during KMH and the time after KMH. 

To engage students in and beyond course activities has been a working practice both at KTH Sound and Music Computing group and at KMH Royal College of Music since many years. This paper collects experiences of involving students in research conducted within the two institutions.  We describe how students attending our courses are given the possibility to be involved in our research activities, and we argue that their involvement both contributes to develop new research and benefits the students in the short and long term.  Among the assignments, activities, and tasks we offer in our education programs are pilot experiments, prototype development, public exhibitions, performing, composing, data collection, analysis challenges, and bachelor and master thesis projects that lead to academic publications.

In this thesis I ́m trying to to find out whether we need to make our art into a product and I am using myself and my career as an example of a product. I wanted to use the word “product” in a positive way and inspire people to think about music management and personal branding as something they could use as a tool when working with something creative. I ́m writing about my own journey as a folk musician and solo artist and wish to turn something personal into something common and shared.

! I approached my research question “How much of a product would you have to be in order to be a successful artist at the Nordic folk music scene?” from three angels. Firstly, I ́ve gathered information that I have from my years as a freelance musician. Secondly, I interviewed a few professionals, and finally I read a lot of material and wrote about the basics of music business and working life of a folk musician in the Nordic countries.

My theory is that we ́re all selling a product when selling our music and playing for money, that is why we need to know this product, love and respect it and have a need to share it. I believe that finding your artistic me is a spiritual journey and when you start searching for your “core” you ́ll become a better musician since you ́re getting better in recognising and handling your own emotions.

I ́m trying to diminish the polarisation between music business and being a genuine artist. I believe that knowing your core gives you power to work better in the field which is continually changing and demands a lot. This spiritual journey into yourself is also an artistic journey and I see personal branding as a fun and inspirational tool for anyone who wants to get to know oneself and build a personal brand which is true, likeable and also selling.

Min konsert ställdes in en gång på grund av Coronapandemin. Jag kom att revidera innehållet under tiden som följde.Konserten kom istället att till större del baseras på ett album jag arbetat med få en tematisk anknytning till Coronakrisen; särskilt att jag och mitt barn drabbades då min sambo insjuknade i ett utdraget och fortfarande pågående förlopp av debiliterande sjukdom.

Ur konsertprogrammet: "Det kommande albumet är inspelat under pågående pandemi och Coronakrisens humanitära konsekvenser har varit ett tungt graviterande centrum i den personligt konstnärliga processen”.

Ett konstverk behöver inget ytterligare egentligt mål, min syn på konst och musik är i denna betydelse absolut. Jag arbetar utifrån en längtan efter att ett verk ska äga rum i sin egen rätt.

Men min examenskonsert som process är ett av de mer sällsynta tillfällen då jag haft som ytterligare syfte att även kommunicera musikens ontogenetiska habitat, den inre metaberättelse som omgärdat mitt konstnärliga arbete.

Det har slagit mig under arbetets gång att min konst ofta är ett sätt att hantera sorg, att med Camus termer skapa en inre mening och känsla av agens där ingen reciprocitet finns att hämta.

Ett examensarbete innehållandes:- Ett stilanalysarbete om Karen Tweeds dragspelande med fokus på swing och instrumentspel- En reflektion kring Alfred Gefverts examenskonsert, en intim föreställning med irländsk och svensk folkmusik.

The folk tradition has often been divided between two sections: on one side is music,on the other is dance. The aim of this research is to study the relationships between dance and music inside one individual to create a new profile: the dancing musician.The process of this research went through different stages. First of all, I relied on my background as a folk musician and dancer to enable dialogue between these two profiles. Then I went beyond the boundaries of the folk tradition by mixing improvisation and folk music. Finally, I analysed movements, meters and expression of each part in order to combine them and to resolve technical issues of the multitasking process. The present study shows different ways of using this dance-music combination as a creative tool and explains what effects those arts have on each other.