• Module Basics Sheet Music
• Advanced Sheet Music Module

• Module Basics Audio
• Advanced Audio Module

These modules with several tutorials introduce various possibilities of computer-assisted analysis of sheet music and audio files on the basis of music-analytical questions. The tutorials can be carried out in self-study or within courses. The duration of the lessons is approximately 4-6 hours or three sessions of a 90-minute with additional preparation, homework, and optional immersion. You can find a list of tutorials here. But first to the question:

There are certainly many different objectives for analyzing music. However, the following two motives are fundamental:

• I want to discover and experience, comprehend and understand something that closes itself to me when I hear it for the first time: How does a certain effect of the music come about? What is it about what makes listening to a certain piece of music moving or exciting or just beautiful?
• Or I want to illustrate or clarify something especially in order to convey and share my experience of the music with others.

Analysis as a discovery and descriptive approach to music always means making musical events explicit, and is thus a means for understanding music and a prerequisite for communicating music.

There are a number of applications and objectives of musical analysis. Here are perhaps the most important:

• Analysis of a single piece of music: the special features of a particular piece are analytically worked out. On this basis, an interpretation of the piece can then be made, e.g. with regard to specific effects and meanings.
• Stylistic analysis: The presentation of the peculiarities of a certain style in a temporally or regionally delimited area or of a personal style. Examples of individual compositions or performances that are typical of a particular style may be examined - or an attempt may be made to derive the style from an analysis of all (or as many as possible) pieces.
• Music history: what stylistic directions can be determined? How are they related to each other on a level of tonal design and how do they differ from each other?

Today, the various procedures and approaches to musical analysis can be extended by computer-aided methods of visualization, statistical evaluation and targeted pattern search. This is what the tutorials are about.

The methodical extension cannot and does not want to replace the listening of music and the examination of the sheet music in any case - but rather wants to extend and empirically substantiate it.

The tutorial on audio analysis focuses on recordings - and thus on listening to music. Recordings can also be visualized with the help of the computer, especially by displaying the spectral energy distribution in relation to time (Basics Audio). For recordings of popular music, of ethnic music, but also of electroacoustic music, new analytical approaches have been developed in which musical notation sometimes plays no role (Advanced Audio).

The project is currently in the testing phase. Feedback is welcome: analyse@hfm-weimar.de