I am currently a little over half way through building a training model for our BCMI (Brain Computer Music Interface) project, and it’s no picnic. The goal is to select 50 2-minute excerpts of piano music in order to build an experimental model for classification by emotional signature. This will eventually be used as the basis for EEG ‘training’ by the other performer in this piece, the illustrious Tim Mullen (Swarz Center for Neuroscience, UCSD).
The real trick is, given that I’m using genre rather than chronology as my basis, what do I pick as my musical material? I’m currently at 7 categories, including the usual suspects (Baroque, Romantic, Jazz, etc…) but when we get to the late 20th Century things seem to become less obvious. Where do we separate the serialists from the maximalists? Many of them were doing both, and in fact at the same time as they were writing their parametric music they were writing beautiful melodies. As the 20th Century drew to a close, there was a pervading perception that the purist attitudes of the avant-garde were not sufficient, and the new eclecticism was (is) being hailed as the savior of modern music. More thinkings to come as the experiment progresses…