Musical PatternViewer Version 1.0 by Ali Nikrang, Tom Collins, and Gerhard Widmer

This version has been tested on Mac OS X 10.9.5


Related publications

Ali Nikrang, Tom Collins, and Gerhard Widmer. PatternViewer: an application for exploring repetitive and tonal structure. In Late-Breaking News and Demos of the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval, Taipei, 2014. International Society for Music Information Retrieval. http://tomcollinsresearch.net/pdf/nikrangEtAlISMIR2014.pdf

Tom Collins, Andreas Arzt, Sebastian Flossmann, and Gerhard Widmer. SIARCT-CFP: improving precision and the discovery of inexact musical patterns in point-set representations. In Alceu S. Britto Jr, Fabien Gouyon, and Simon Dixon (Eds), Proceedings of the International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval, pp. 549-554, Curitiba, 2013. International Society for Music Information Retrieval. http://tomcollinsresearch.net/pdf/collinsEtAlISMIR2013.pdf

Diana Deutsch and John Feroe. The internal representation of pitch sequences in tonal music. Psychological Review, 88(6):503-522, 1981.

Carol L. Krumhansl. Cognitive foundations of musical pitch. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Craig Stuart Sapp. Visual hierarchical key analysis. ACM Computers in Entertainment, 3(4):1-19, 2005.


Software credits

PatternViewer is built with OpenFrameworks ( http://openframeworks.cc ) and Audio Engine: FMOD Sound System by Firelight Technologies( http://fmod.com ).


Installation and opening a piece of music

1. If you are reading this, you have probably already downloaded and unzipped the file at

www.tomcollinsresearch.net/research/PatternViewer/app/macosx/PatternViewer_ver1_0.zip

If not, please do so now.

2. Move the unzipped ‘PatternViewer_ver1_0’ folder to an appropriate location, such as Applications (you may be prompted to enter your machine password).

3. Having downloaded some music with which to use the PatternViewer (see instructions at www.tomcollinsresearch.net/research/PatternViewer on ‘Downloading music’), double-click on the PatternViewer icon inside the ‘PatternViewer_ver1_0’ folder.

4. A blank PatternViewer interface should appear, and, in front of this, a dialogue window for locating and opening a piece of music. Use the dialogue window to locate the folder for the piece of music you would like to open, and, within this folder, select a file along the lines of config*.txt, either by double-clicking on config*.txt or single-clicking on ‘Open’.

5. The piece of music should open, with accompanying visualisations, and begin to play. For more details on using/understanding the PatternViewer interface, please see below.
 

Using/understanding the interface

1. Play/pause with the spacebar key. Global navigation in the audio can be achieved via clicking/dragging in the media control bar (top right). Local navigation in the audio can be achieved by clicking in the coloured dot display (top panel).

2. Listen to particular pattern occurrences by clicking on the nodes in the pendular graph (top left). Occurrences of the same pattern have the same letter name and vertical position (but different subscript values). Longer patterns tend to be placed towards the top of the graph, and shorter patterns towards the bottom. Edges indicate subset relationships between pattern occurrences.

3. When a pattern occurrence is active, its node will appear red and the notes belonging to that occurrence will be displayed in the piano-roll representation (bottom right).

4. The coloured dot display (top panel) shows the current estimated key of the music. Use the coloured circle of fifths in the bottom left to determine the keys to which these colours refer.

5. To load another piece of music, press the ’N’ key to open the dialogue window.


Interface settings

For any downloaded piece of music, the downloaded folder contains a text file along the lines of config*.txt. file in the data folder, e.g., to optimise the application to your machine or to experiment with different pieces.

