Event Description
Ph.D. Research Proposal of Brandon Morton on Predicting Musical Influence Between Musicians
Advisor
Abstract
All musicians have been influenced by previous generations of artists. In the past, composers would often pay homage to those that came before them by borrowing musical phrases or concepts. During the era of recorded music, the influence of older artists on younger musicians has continued at an even quicker pace. For example, James Brown, who was popular in the 1950's and 60's influenced Michael Jackson (popular in the 70's and 80's). Michael Jackson went on to influence Chris Brown (popular in the 2000's and 2010's). By examining the flow of influence, we can obtain an interesting look into how music has evolved and adapted throughout history. Musicologists have been interested in the topic of influence between composers for centuries and have developed methods and heuristics for determining influence in classical music. Their methods usually involve looking for similarities in the musical score and while this works well for music where the score is the primary (canonical) source of information, this type of analysis is not well suited for modern popular music, where the audio recording itself is arguably the primary representation. For my thesis, I propose to develop an audio content-based system for influence prediction. |