Assignment: Distinguishing Baroque Dance Rhythms

This is a collaborative assignment involving all members of the class. Our goal is to create a computer program that will distinguish different baroque dance rhythms: allemande, boureé, courante, gigue, galliard, siciliano, etc. The purpose of this activity is to provide practical experience in identifying stylistic features.

Our project will involve the following tasks:

1. Assembling a representative sample of baroque dance pieces. We will aim to collect 25 sample pieces for each dance rhythm. We will omit any dance rhythm for which we are unable to find a minimum of 10 pieces. The sample should include many different composers with different nationalities.
2. The first page of each sampled piece will need to be photocopied and the reference information (composer, title, publisher, date, library call number) hand-written on the photocopy.
3. Using a random number generator, we will randomly select two pairs of successive bars for each sampled piece. (This will give us 100 measures of music for each dance rhythm.)
4. The rhythms of the principal melody lines from these sampled measure-pairs will need to be encoded in the Humdrum format.
5. In class, we will calculate some basic statistics about these rhythms. These statistics will then be incorporated into a computer program.
6. We will then encode the rhythms from an independent "test" sample of the various dance rhythms.
7. We will use the computer program to attempt to categorize the dance rhythms for our test sample. This will allow us to measure the success of the rhythmic categorization.

DUE DATE: The sampled music should be assembled by January 13th, 2005.
DUE DATE: The music should be electronically encoded by January 18th, 2005.

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