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Dr Alan Marsden

Alan Marsden

Senior Lecturer: Music

Department: Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts

Degree: BA (Soton) PhD (Cantab)

Associated research centres and groups: Centre for Research into the Applications of Computers to Music, Music

Personal website

Current Teaching

At undergraduate level, I teach harmony, Schenkerian analysis, and psychology of music. I supervise dissertations in systematic musicology.

Research Interests

I am interested in scientific and mathematical approaches to music, not because I think music can be reduced to formulae—I believe it cannot—but because we learn a lot in the attempt. Furthermore, with computer tools, a systematic approach allows us to do interesting musical things. Since July 2004, I have been editor of the leading journal in the area of scientific, systematic and technological research in music, the Journal of New Music Research.

My principal research objective is to develop computational systems which allow us to reach a deeper understanding of how music presents an aural environment which captivates a listener's attention. To this end, I have developed software which implements some aspects of Schenkerian theory (a quasi-grammatical theory of music which reveals underlying hierarchical structures). The software allows a computer to automatically derive a structure (I do not say the structure) from extracts of music. Adjustment of the parameters and precise workings of the software allows us to investigate the factors which guide musicians' judgements when making an analysis of a piece of music.

In other work, I have studied formal representation of time in music, and more recently pitch. I am interested more generally in music software systems which operate in a properly 'musical' manner, and have subsidiary interests in visualisation and educational software.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

Computational musicology, music information retrieval, intelligent music software systems, formal music theory, Schenkerian analysis

Publications

A full list of publications is available on my personal web page.

Eprints Publications Repository and Bibliographic Database

Alan Marsden has 9 selected publication records listed on this webpage. Use links to access abstracts and full text where available. View all records to sort by date, type and title. For all ePrints records go to http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk

Marsden, Alan (2009) 'What was the question?': music analysis and the computer. In: Modern Methods for Musicology. Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities . Ashgate, Farnham, England, pp. 137-147. ISBN 9780754673026

Marsden, Alan A. (2007) Automatic Derivation of Musical Structure: A Tool for Research on Schenkerian Analysis. In: International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, 2007-09-01, Vienna.

Marsden, Alan (2007) Timing in music and temporal logic. Journal of Mathematics and Music, 1 (3). pp. 173-189. ISSN 1745-9745

Marsden, Alan A. and Lindsay, A. and MacKenzie, A. and Nock, H. (2007) Tools for Searching, Annotation and Analysis of Speech, Music, Film and Video: A Survey. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 22 (4). pp. 469-488. ISSN 14774615

Marsden, Alan A. (2005) Generative Structural Representation of Tonal Music. Journal of New Music Research, 34 (4). pp. 409-208. ISSN 09298215

Marsden, Alan A. (2001) Representing Melodic Patterns as Networks of Elaborations. Computers and the Humanities, 35 (1). pp. 37-54. ISSN 0010 4817

Marsden, A. A. (2000) Music, intelligence and artificiality. In: Readings in music and artificial intelligence. Contemporary music studies ; v. 20 . Harwood Academic, Amsterdam, pp. 15-28. ISBN 9057550946

Marsden, A. A. (2000) Representing musical time : a temporal-logic approach. Studies on new music research ; 4 . Swets & Zeitlinger Publishers, Lisse. ISBN 9026516355

Marsden, Alan (1999) Computers and the concept of tonality. In: Information technology and scholarship : applications in the humanities and social sciences. Oxford University Press for the British Academy, Oxford, pp. 33-52. ISBN 0197262058

Associated Keywords: Computer music, Computing, Computing in the Humanities, Digital humanities, Music, Music information retrieval, Music psychology and cognition, Music technology

View all research activities, ePrints, news and events associated with Alan Marsden.

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