**PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ROOM HAS CHANGED SINCE ORIGINALLY PUBLICIZED AND THIS LECTURE WILL NOW TAKE PLACE IN TANNA SCHULICH HALL.
The wine and cheese reception will take place in room A833 (8th floor of the New Music Building).
ABSTRACT:
Techniques for discovering topological structures in large data sets are now becoming practical. This talk argues why the musical realm is a particularly promising arena in which to expect to find nontrivial topological features. The analysis is able to recover three important topological features in music: the circle of notes, the circle of fifths, and the rhythmic repetition of timelines, often pictured in the necklace notation.
Applications to folk music (in the form of standard MIDI files) are presented and the bar codes show a variety of interesting features, some of which can be easily interpreted.
ABOUT WILLIAM SETHARES:
W. A. Sethares received a B.A. degree in mathematics from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. He has worked at the Raytheon Company as a Systems Engineer and is currently Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Prof. Sethares has held visiting positions at the Australian National University, at CCMIX in Paris, at the Technical Institute in Gdansk,
Poland, at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Mountainview CA, at Cornell University in Ithaca NY, and at METU in Ankara Turkey. His research interests include adaptation and learning in signal processing, communications, and acoustics, and is author of Tuning, Timbre, Spectrum, Scale (Springer, now in its second edition), coauthor of Telecommunication Breakdown: Concepts of Communications Transmitted via Software Radio (Prentice-Hall 2004) and Rhythm and Transforms (Springer 2007).
His official university web address is: http://www.engr.wisc.edu/ece/faculty/sethares_william.html , though his personal web page http://eceserv0.ece.wisc.edu/~sethares/ contains far more interesting information.
VIDEO ARCHIVE - WILLIAM SETHARES
APA video citation:
Sethares, W. (2013, March 11). Topology of musical data -
CIRMMT Distinguished Lectures in the Science and Technology of Music. [Video file].
Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFzy_5RVqF4