What are melodic intervals?
In music, the range of jumps, of intervals, goes from minus twenty-four to plus twenty-four, from minus two octaves to plus two octaves. Each interval corresponds to a semitone. Thus, in the sequence of notes C, D, E, there are two intervals between C and D, as well as between D and E. Another example: if we go down of a fifth, the interval will be minus seven. Let us notice that there is not always an interval between two musical notes. At any time, in a musical title, the same note can be repeated, once or numerous times. We then speak of unisons.
Melodic interval distribution in the YMusic music search engine
In YMusic, let us open “Advanced music criteria research” and, then, “Presence of melodic intervals”. Let us also open the scroll-down menu: we see the complete list of all musical intervals between minus two octaves and plus two octaves, including the well-known fifth and third. The first choice is unison. Just below the scroll-down menu, there are potentiometers that allow us to fix the minimum and maximum percentages. Let us select “Unison” and “90 to 95% of Presence”. Then let us click on “Search”: YMusic displays a list of 49 titles. Then let us open "Mean value of melodic intervals". This average value, which may not be in the piece of music, is the sum of the rising and falling intervals in that title. It will therefore be named after one of the forty-eight intervals: unison, third, fifth, and so on.
For our list of 49 results, let us set the “Mean value of melodic intervals” between minus twenty-four and plus twenty-four. let us click on “Search”: an additional column is displayed in the results: “Mean M.I. ”, in other words : mean melodic interval. For each of the 49 results, the mean value of melodic intervals is, very logically, the unison, since each title has between 90 and 95% of repeated notes. Now let us select the tracks that have 90% of repeated notes. There are 12 of them. Let us open or create our account, then let us click on “Playlists”, in order to add these 12 tracks in a playlist that we can listen to.
We are not going to open them now, but we can define the other parameters related to the distribution of melodic intervals. First, “Melodic Interval Dispersal” measures how many intervals the elements in the ensemble deviate from the mean. Thus, if 95% of the notes jump together from two semitones, in a title, the dispersal will be close to 0%.
Then the "Melodic interval directions" is used to see if the trend is rising or falling. We notice the presence of three potentiometers, for this criterion. The first, "Ascending", has the function of determining the percentage of rising intervals in the notes of a piece of music. In the case of a simple sequence using the notes of the scale (C, D, E, F, G, H, I, C), we have 100% of ascending intervals. «Descending» of course measures the contrary», and “Unison” measures the percentage of repeated notes.
Finally, the last parameters measure the “Different melodic intervals”, the “Smallest descending melodic interval”, the “Largest descending melodic interval”, the “Smallest ascending melodic interval”, and the “Largest ascending melodic interval”.
YMusic, an asset for music professionals
The YMusic search engine analyzes music using musical criteria based on the content of almost forty thousand pieces of music listed in the YMusic database.
Today, music listeners listen to more music in a single year than their seventeenth-century ancestors during their entire existence. However, online music services ask their users to have a specific query in mind when entering keywords, such as a title. Due to these language limitations, there is a gap between listeners expectations and what they receive, in terms of musical content. It is not enough to type the word inspiring to receive as the first search result a piece of music that will automatically inspire us.
This is even more obvious in a general search engine. If a user writes, in the search box, What are musical pieces similar to the "Rite of Spring" by Stravinsky, the results include links to different interpretations of the title, pages devoted to Stravinsky's life or to his work. However, no title similar to the "Rite of Spring" at the musical level is mentioned directly in the results and no link to listen to this similar music is provided. Everything must still be done! Idem for your favorite music. This means that listeners do not receive an answer to their original question.
Neither general search engines, nor streaming services, are programmed either to analyze the musical content of a title and provide the results to the user, or to establish direct musical relationships between different pieces of music. This is not their function, but it is the purpose of YMusic.
We are passionate about our mission, which is to create a technological innovation in the field of music which aims to help all music listeners to understand it in more depth. Developed by a computer engineer recognized for his expertise in the music software industry, YMusic is more than an algorithm that searches for chords or melodies, it is the first musical search engine in the full sense of the term.
In another presentation, we will continue to present the YMusic parameters related to rhythmic harmonics. Good research with YMusic!
Written by Françoise Delsaux, Marketing designer and product designer
Arpege Music Software Development
hello @ music-search-engine.info
http://www.arpegemusic.com
Arpege's mission is to develop sheet music composition and notation software, in an environment now completed by the YMusic search engine, an intelligent technology which provides musicians with quantified insights, via music visualizations and similarities graphs.
What can you do with this information?
Each music (re)searcher has his/her own targets, in various contexts and we providing guidelines for research or publishing is not our mission.
Our role is rather to help researchers to renew the manner in which they can see and assemble musical elements to get a deeper understanding of music, exploiting all new information into their specific framework and transforming it into knowledge.
We wish you great hours and interesting finds with YMusic.