As a result, imitative polyphony achieves a sonic depth akin to the visual depth in contemporaneous paintings with vanishing-point perspective. As one listens, it becomes apparent that all the voices in the ensemble participate in the imitative process. The single most prominent feature in sixteenth-century polyphony, evident in nearly every musical genre, is “pervading imitation,” a style of composition in which one voice follows another, singing the same melodic motif or fragment, but normally starting on a different pitch. Thus, a music print from the sixteenth century normally included between four and eight oblong partbooks, each one labeled by range, e.g., “Cantus,” “Altus,” “Tenor,” “Bassus,” with additional voices identified as “Quintus,” “Sextus,” etc.

Instead of the large “choirbook format” of fifteenth-century music books that an entire choir could sing from, the printed books were small and limited to individual voice parts. Following the lead of Ottaviano Petrucci in Venice, who pioneered the process, printers quickly set up music presses in France and Germany as well as in other cities in Italy. The first music printed from movable type dates from 1501. Kurt-Owen Richards, Peter Stewart – basses Commentary on the ProgramĪmong the many treasures in the music collection of the Library of Congress are printed partbooks containing sixteenth-century Masses, motets, and madrigals, the sources for some of the greatest musical works of the “golden age of polyphony.” Today’s concert focuses on choral works preserved in this collection, featuring music by Josquin Desprez, Palestrina, Lassus, Andrea Gabrieli, and Victoria, with one fifteenth-century work (the introit from Ockeghem’s Requiem Mass) as an example of what came before, as well as one work from the early seventeenth century (Giovanni Gabrieli’s motet Exultavit cor meum) as witness to what came after. Patrick Fennig, Thomas McCargar – baritones Nathaniel Adams, Neil Farrell, Peter Gruett, Michael Steinberger, Christopher Preston Thompson – tenors Martha Cluver, Melissa Fogarty, Sarah Hawkey, Chloe Holgate, Michele Kennedy – sopranos Gloria, Missa L’homme armé sexti toni, 4vvĪgnus Dei, Missa L’homme armé sexti toni, 6vv Intermission Motet, Preter rerum seriem, 6vv Finally, we conduct a glass ceiling analysis to study the current limitations of the method, and possible directions for future work are proposed.Renaissance Music from the Library of Congress Collection Further evaluation of the algorithm is provided in the form of a qualitative error analysis and the study of the effect of key parameters and algorithmic components on system performance.

A comparative evaluation of the proposed approach shows that it outperforms current state-of-the-art melody extraction systems in terms of overall accuracy. This leads to the development of new voicing detection, octave error minimization and melody selection techniques. We define a set of contour characteristics and show that by studying their distributions we can devise rules to distinguish between melodic and non-melodic contours.

Our approach is based on the creation and characterization of pitch contours, time continuous sequences of pitch candidates grouped using auditory streaming cues. We present a novel system for the automatic extraction of the main melody from polyphonic music recordings.

Polyphonic music library