Douglas McGilvray, BEng(Hons), IEE
Email: MailTo(d.mcgilvray AT SPAMFREE elec DOT gla DOT ac DOT uk)
Dougie started research in 2003 as an ESPRC funded PhD student studying the representation and analysis of musical performance.
Current Projects
Performance Markup Language
Performance Markup Language (PML) is an open, extendable XML-based representation which is intended to be used as a basis for systems used to investigate elements of musical performance. It can be used to extend XML-based musical notation representations to include support for the representation of performance markup and analytical structures.
[http://www.n-ism.org/Projects/pml.php PML Home Page]
Rosegarden Codicil
The Rosegarden Codicil is a rehearsal tool which helps musicians perfect their performance pitch. It is specifically designed for rehearsing microtonal music. It provides real-time and post-performance feedback allowing the performer to record and analyse various performances. The Rosegarden Codicil extends the [http://www.rosegarden-music.com/ Rosegarden Sequencer] to provide accurate pitch feedback both in real-time and post-performance for almost any tuning system.
The Rosegarden Codicil is part of a larger project, [http://www.n-ism.org/Projects/microtonalism.php Microtonalism] which is a collaboration of composers, performers, psychologists and engineers from several insitutions worldwide including Royal College of Music, University of Graz & University of Glasgow.
Pierrot Lunaire
Pierrot Lunaire is a set of 21 poems written by Albert Giraud. Schoenberg's identically titled work sets these poems against an instrumental background. The music uses traditional forms such as canon, fugue and counterpoint, although the music is freely atonal and the text is performed in 'Sprechgesang'. Sprechgesang (also known as Sprechstimme) is a type of vocal enunciation between speech and singing. Some references instruct the performer to hit the notated pitch at the onset of a note, but immediately depart from the notated pitch (Berg, in a prefatory note to Wozzeck) other sources describe the notated pitch as an 'approximate pitch', Schoenberg's own directions for performance of the piece are unclear.
This project aims to illuminate the current performance traditions associated with this piece. Speech recognition and alignment techniques will be used to align the performance to the score at the phoneme level. This will allow a detailed analysis of performed pitch and pitch contour in the context of the melodic contour in the score and the counter point between the vocalist and the instrumentalists.
The initial dataset consists of a series of solo performances by [http://www.classical-artists.com/janemanning/ Jane Manning]. Jane Manning is the most prolific (and widely regarded as the best) performer of Pierrot Lunaire, with several published recordings. She has studied Pierrot Lunaire extensively and gives frequent seminars and master classes on the work.
Past Projects
DMRN Glasgow - Postgraduate's Conference
A conference funded by the Digital Music Research Network and held at the University of Glasgow. The conference was held in July 2005, and provided an opportunity for young researchers and composers to present and discuss their work. Although the official (i.e. funded) period of the DMRN has ended, the DMRN conference continues, organised by postgraduate researchers studying at institutions within the UK.
Links
The n-ism [http://www.n-ism.org/index.php site]: The Network for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science, Technology & Music
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