Learning grammars from musical improvisations

using entropy measures

Dimitris Charlaftis

Formal Grammars can be a powerful modeling tool for a large range of

scientific fields. They can be used in different areas for understanding the structure
of the systems' functionality they are applied to. Learning grammars from a
collection of data that have arisen from such systems' behavior can help us make
decisions about their evolution and in extension, to have a more sophisticated
knowledge of their nature. The usefulness of such a formalism is a result of its
potential applicability to further multidisciplinary research.
The necessity for the use of such a methodology is growing proportionally
with the exponential growth of the data that come up in those systems. For
example, formal grammars can be applied to model end-users navigation on the
web, which is a vast collection of behaviors, or to standardize biological data (for
example DNA structures). The numbers used in those circumstances are very large
and the need to build models for understanding the normality subsumed by their
function is obvious.
Formal grammars can also be used in musical composition, in a sense that
they are a collection of descriptive rules for analyzing or generating sequences of
symbols which represent musical parameters, such as notes and their attributes. By
using a specific set of rules, we can obtain musical sequences that can be either
represented by finite state automata.
Inverting the process described above, the arisen goal is to obtain a formal
grammar from a given set of musical pieces. To be more precise, given a set of
improvisations - meaning musical streams that are not written in a musical scores
but recorded during the spontaneous execution of a piece as the musician plays his
variations on its main themes, we can built a structure that gives us the opportunity
to understand them better. A formal grammar (or a finite state automaton) built on
such large collections can model the behavior of the musicians involved in them (a
fact that can be related to their cultural environment and other ethnomusicological
factors) or determine classification schemes on them.
A common policy for providing classification techniques is to consider whole
musical passages as specific instances, having a set of enumerated attributes, which
is a classical approach in machine learning methodologies. Those attributes can be
related to various musicological characteristics, such as tempo, timbre, harmonic
density, polyphony etc. As a result, a musical passage can be represented by a
multidimensional vector, each of its number representing the value of the equivalent
attribute in the enumeration. Using metrics such as the euclidean distance, we can
obtain a "visual" and quantitative representation of their resemblance.
The classification methods can either be supervised (by having a training set to
built the model and then test the algorithm using an evaluation set of pieces), or
unsupervised, using clustering techniques, so as to let the algorithm have the
opportunity to provide its own scheme by the "raw" material used. By obtaining
those clusters we can have a perspective view of the input and make decisions on
the special characteristics of those pieces.
Instead of using written musical passages as input, we can consider a set of
improvisations that can be transformed into vectors-instances. Modeling improvising
techniques help us to understand better the idioms, the richness of the musical
genres and the idiosyncrasy of the musicians involved in them. Such differences and
resemblances between several improvisations can yield from a comprehensive
research and can be found in various musical genres, locations or eras. The above
can be a start point for further and large anthropological study.
The classification schemes provided by the techniques mentioned above give
us an image of the instance space that is somehow static, in a sense that we do not
have a relation between the shape of the clusters as they could possibly be before
and after the process of the modeling. As useless as this may seem to be in standard
pieces written down in musical scores, it is crucial in cases of improvisation because
of their evolutionary and dynamically transforming nature. A lazy approach could be
a series of classifications at several time periods, probably using adaptive learning
techniques to reduce the search space. Nevertheless, this contributes to a growth of
complexity beyond the bounds of computation if we want to observe improvisation
schemes during a large interval.
A solution to the above problem is to learn formal grammars from these
improvisational material. Given sets of those improvisations, we can deduce specific
rules than imply a kind of normality in those musical corpora that can be applied to
explain future improvisational skills. We thus gain an evolutionary model of the
structure of the improvisational process, which helps us to understand its nature and
development along time and space.
The greatest drawback of this approach is the fact that the process of
improvisation – most of the times one could say (?) - does not conform to certain
rules, but is mainly characterized by the feeling of spontaneity or uncertainty. This is
the recipe for a live, vivid and inspired improvisation. Nevertheless, it is certain that
this “window of freedom” of those solos is bounded by the harmonic and rhythmic
structure of the main piece. A musical performer, as heuristic and inspiring as he
may be, he must first conform to the main structure and then expand it at will. This
“expanding bias” is his personal musical signature on the piece.
 A second thought that gives an answer to the above questions and makes the
study more literate and sophisticated, is that we can somehow measure the degrees
of freedom of the improvisational process by the use of entropy terms. To be more
precise, imagine a small piece written in the C major scale (Ionian mode), in a sense
that most of the notes played in that piece belong to that scale. If a musician plays
the C note on his instrument, then the information gained by that musical event is
near zero. If we suppose that after a while, during his solo, he plays the B flat note,
then the entropy increases, as the Mixolydian mode is implied. In the meantime he
can play all the notes from the C major scale. Given that history of notes, if he now
plays the E flat note, then, combined to the previous B flat note, it implies the Dorian
mode and the information gained is altered. Analogous alterations in normality will
happen if he suddenly makes - let us say - a three octave leap and plays the next
note at a very high frequency range. The simple examples above can help us
understand that the tendency that one musician has for applying novel ideas in his
improvisation results in equivalent entropy fluctuations that can be measured and
embedded in the general study, reducing combinatorial explosion and similar chaotic
phenomena.
In conclusion, formal grammars, enriched with entropy measures can provide
the X-ray of the backbone of the improvisational process. It can be a powerful tool
that help us understand the implying characteristics of those spontaneous
sequences macroscopically in space, i.e from human to human and time.