Eric P. Nichols

Musicat: A Computer Model of Musical Listening and Analogy-Making

Eric P. Nichols
December 2012

Ph.D. Committee

Dr. Douglas R. Hofstadter (principal adviser)
Dr. Eric Isaacson
Dr. Donald Byrd
Dr. Michael Gasser

PDF files of dissertation

Downlad the entire dissertation PDF (24MB) or view individual chapters:

Front Matter
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Work that has Influenced this Project
Chapter 3: Musicat's Domain
Chapter 4: Music and Analogy
Chapter 5: Musicat Listens to Bad Melodies
Chapter 6: Musicat Listens to Simple Melodies
Chapter 7: Musicat Listens to Complex Melodies
Chapter 8: The Architecture of Musicat
Chapter 9: The Evolution of Musicat
Chapter 10: Conclusions and Future Work
Appendix A: References
Appendix B: Pilot Study
Appendix C: Preliminary Quantitative Results
Curriculum Vitae

Supplemental Materials

Testing Data

Ground truth: Simple melodies
Ground truth: Complex melodies
Ground truth: Essen subset, simplified

Code

C# code developed on Windows with Visual Studio 2010 [zip file]. May also require the Fughetta font to be installed. N.B. this version is called "RhythmCat" because I never got around to changing the name in Visual Studio -- but this is indeed Musicat. There's no good documentation though; good luck!

Videos

Coming eventually...