23.6. Musical Patterns in Musical Interactions: Understanding and Employing Repetition in Music

Over the past decades, mathematical and computational models of musical structures have been successfully developed in interdisciplinary research areas such as Mathematical Music Theory and Music Information Retrieval, with different goals such as music analysis, retrieval, classification or recommendation.  In this talk, I will discuss how the modelling process on the one hand uncovers layers of implicit musical knowledge applied by experts and ordinary listeners when interacting with music, and on the other hand enables new forms of interaction with music. Taking repetition in music, specifically repeated patterns, as the central topic of this talk, I will show how the modeling process contributes to enhancing our understanding of the role of musical repetition for how we make sense of music. Moreover, I will discuss how we employ this knowledge for facilitating novel forms of musical interactions, such as within serious games for music education, health care and well-being.

Anja Volk is Associate Professor at the Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University. She has a dual background in mathematics and musicology which she applies to cross-disciplinary approaches at the intersection of computer science and music. Her research aims at enhancing our understanding of music as a fundamental human trait while applying these insights for developing music technologies that offer new ways of interacting with music, such as in the newly emerging field of music, computing, and health.