Melodic Fusion: Toward Cross-Cultural Music Transformation
Cross-Cultural Theme and Variation

Personal Motivation:  I believe we can augment our musical expression and communicate with a broader audience by breaking cultural boundaries through the fusion of musical characteristics from different musical traditions.  I was the Principal of the Zheng (Chinese Zither) section in the Chinese Orchestra of my high school in Hong Kong, and later received formal western musical training at the USC Thornton School of Music, specializing in music composition.  I became sensitive to how different cultures choose to build their music expressions, and how cross-cultural exchange can lead audiences into new realms of affect and meaning.  This inspired me to explore in my master's thesis the musical grammars unique to each cultures and how these musical grammars may transcend stylistic boundaries to augment our musical expression.  As many cultural heritages are disappearing as rapidly as the tropical forest, I believe we can reconnect and revitalize these traditions by learning to include them as part of our expressive palate when composing and performing.  Not only will this enrich our musical imagination, but also deepen our understanding towards our own cultural roots.

Goal: To learn what defines the melodic characteristics of a particular culture.  I strive to automate melodic reductions in the context of a culture’s modal system in order to find the deep structure for recasting melodies between cultures.  By rapidly prototyping transformations, the system can provide melodic materials interactively for composers to use in writing cross-cultural theme and variations.  In practice, I propose to transform melodies across cultures by mapping their modal systems. The modal system of each culture is learned by searching for repeated patterns in melodies to identify the arrangement of intervals on the scale, the predominance of certain scale degrees, the melodic processes and the cadence formulae. These learned patterns can help induce the functional hierarchy of principal scale degrees and the usage of ornamental scale degrees.  I intend to map the modal systems by finding parallel structures between the cultures. The musical structure of a melody can be seen as multiple levels of abstraction, consisting of embellishments, motif, contour, phrase and form, all functioning in the context of the modal system. Melodies can be transformed at any of these levels by adjusting their modal qualities. I plan to derive a systematic compositional approach to cross-cultural melodic writing. I hope such a model can motivate composers to see the inclusion of cultural musical features as an accessible way to expand their ranges of expressions.  My master’s thesis is informed by two other projects, Soundscapes and Cross-Cultural Sound Transformation.

Cross-Cultural Sound Transformation explores the morphing of sounds, and the creation of new sounds by mixing timbral colors, as a metaphor to painters mixing basic colors to find their unique color. Sound transformation is achieved by interpolating the amplitude envelope of salient frequencies in an ethnic instruments’ spectrum to find just the right shade of oriental flavour.

Spatial Music Conductor
In additional to new modes of interaction in composition, I recently invented “Spatial Music Conductor” to enable new modes of interaction in performance.

My wearable capacitive sensing interface allows conductors to use arm gestures to control the spatiality of sound in performance.
In a surround-speaker environment, we empower conductors with the ability to manipulate dynamically the spatial dimension of music, such as from macro- to micro-levels, center of gravity of the overall sound texture, spatial placement of instruments, movement of a musical gesture, and shaping of individual sounds evolving through space.

Moreover, we turn the intangible sound waves into a tangible-like medium that could be “pulled and pushed” by physical gestures.

Furthermore, this project explores the relationship between sound perception, space and movement in the intertwined act of performance and composition. When I compose, I often find myself imagining the physicality of how the instruments perform in real-time. And in live performances, as apart from listening to recordings, I believe that audiences are also used to correlating the sounds that they hear to the instrumental actions that they see on stage. Audiences often find the music more difficult to comprehend when such a relationship is lost. “Spatial Music Conductor” seeks to reestablish this link in spatial music by having a conductor onstage using arm gestures to interactively control the spatial arrangements of sounds. This provides a more intuitive visual-aural reinforcement to help audiences follow the narration presented in the spatial dimension. “Spatial Music Conductor” maps the dimension vertical to one’s body to the space enclosed by the surround-sound speakers. It can be seen as a natural extension from the conducting tradition, since traditionally to conduct the brass or percussion section, or even a choir standing behind the entire orchestra, conductors reach out by conducting further away from their bodies and higher up in the air. “Spatial Music Conductor” enables performers to transform traditional pieces and elaborate electronic pieces by interactively manipulating the spatial parameters such as the center of gravity of the overall texture, the spatial placement of instruments, and the shaping of individual sounds moving through space. This allows us to turn intangible sounds into "tangible" objects that can be pushed and pulled by physical gestures.
 

Nightmarket Workshop
Initiated and organized by media-lab student Jackie Lee, the Nightmarket workshop is held annually in Taiwan by a group of MIT students.  We aim to explore participatory modes of cross-disciplinary collaboration in the creative process of designing and implementing interactive art installations to order to address local sociocultural phenomena. The methodological contributions of this workshop are being disseminated to an international audience through our joint publications at the 2008 Computer/Human Interaction (CHI) conference in Florence, Italy.

Nightmarket Workshop 2007 (Taiwan Workshop):
Lee, C.H., Chao, Y.H., Shen, E.Y., Huang, C.Z.A., Li, W.H., Jahn, M. (2008). Nightmarket Workshops: Art & Science in Action. In Design Theater section of Computer/Human Interaction (CHI), Italy. (to appear)

 

Palestrina Pal: A Grammar Check for Music Compositions in the Style of Palestrina
A GUIDO, JAVA-based computer-assisted composition (CAC) tool with a graphical user interface for interactive composing. The system automatically checks for Palestrina style rules interactively to allow composers focus on higher-level aesthetic issues.

Huang, C. Z. A. & Chew, E. (2005). Palestrina Pal: A Grammar Checker for Music Compositions in the Style of Palestrina. In Proceedings of International Conference of Understanding and Creating Music Conference, Italy. (pdf)
Huang, C. Z. A. & Chew, E. (2005, 2004, 2003). Palestrina Pal: A Grammar Checker for Music Compositions in the Style of Palestrina. In the IMSC Year 9, 8, 7 NSF Annual Tech Report.

Atonal Chord Transistor
An experimental CAC tool for creating general chord transitions for non-tonal music. The idea behind ACT is to generate atonal musical transitions that build tension and relaxation by controlling the degree of vertical dissonances and linear disjunctness when given a starting point, a goal, and a user-synthesized scale. It is designed to explore the possibilities of a pitch space and provide inspiration for compositional material, rather than rule-based guidance. My recent composition, titled “a5”, for oboe, horn, tuba, marimba and viola has benefited from the chords generated by ACT by exploring their usages as local chord progressions and macroscopically re-voiced as arrival points that structure the piece. The system currently fills in the gap between the starting and ending chord by generating “3-voiced closed position” atonal chords. The transitions are generated by following linear trajectories, utilizing the A* search algorithm with high penalties to chords that bare tonal implications.
Future improvements include to enable variable number of "voices" in chords, to allow wider ranges, to include user-tunable degree of dissonance and degree of linear tendency, and to correct pitch spellings.

http://www-scf.usc.edu/~ise575/a/projects/huang/