ELECTROPHONIC MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

**Definition:** This place covers:

**Glossary:** - Musical instrument: "tool", "device" , "process" or "protocol" for performing some musical task involving electrophonic signals, e.g. musical parameters - Music: A n art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.Music (including singing, the vocalized form of music) is distinguished from speech by its particular and deliberate emphasis on the above common elements, especially rhythm and melody.By contrast, speech is distinguished from music by its particular and deliberate emphasis on conveying meaning: Speech is the vocalized form of human communication - Musical: Generally employed in a restrictive limiting sense with respect to speech, general audio and sound, i.e. implying an intentional and artistic main focus at least by the performer on at least one of harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre, or expressivity. Even though one person's music may be noise to another, music is a performing art, and musical character is defined by the mere artistic intent of the performer - Musical content: Set of musical parameters. - Musical parameters: Constituent element of "musical content" as defined above. Musical parameters include e.g. pitch, rhythm, timbre, texture, expressivity or dynamics. - MIDI: MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface and refers to a note oriented music file and transmission format. Many variations and improvements of this note oriented format exist. The use of the acronym MIDI should be broadly interpreted as also referring to any note oriented format for transmission or recording. - Performance: has three meanings in this field : -in a first meaning, it is an event in which a performer or group of (typically human) performers behave in a particular way (e.g. in their manner of singing or performing music) for another group of people. -in a second meaning it refers to a metric quantifying how well an entity (human, device, or process) deals with a specific aspect of a specific (not necessarily musical, e.g. mflops for a DSP processor in a synthesiser) task- in a third, narrower meaning, it is meant as the strict intersection of the above two meanings, i.e. quantifying the closeness of a performer's performance to a predetermined musical or singing reference i - Karaoke: (translation from the Japanese: "empty orchestra"; synonyms: KTV, Noraebang) Karaoke refers to singing into a microphone by amateur performers along e.g. recorded music or a music video, often with a lyrics display or with performance evaluation - Instrument karaoke: Playing a predetermined melody on a musical instrument or a musical instrument interface, often with score following along with recorded or synthesised accompaniment, often with means for evaluating or scoring the quality of the performance - Rhythm: Regular recurrence or pattern in time, associated concepts: meter, tempo, articulation and beat: - Expressivity: Musical properties which cannot be properly described by notions of harmony, rhythm, pitch, timbre or texture, and which are linked to a particular manner of execution of a musical piece, e.g. indications of mood, e.g. "dolce", or to corresponding note execution parameters such as vibrato or legato, some of which can be coded in communications protocols such as MIDI e.g. expressivity controller. - Polyphony: Ability of a synthesiser to simultaneously generate a limited number of unrelated melodic lines, Polyphony is conventionally quantified as the number of available "voices": a sound-generating device with six voices may be described as being, for example, six-voice polyphonicEach melodic line or simultaneous note requires one resource entity (for example a block of electronic hardware or a time-slot in a Digital Signal Processor program) capable of generating a single tone, and this is what is known as one "voice" - Voice: Has several important meanings in this field :- Resource entity (hardware, time slot) needed to generate a single tone or a single melodic line, in the context of polyphony. The term is generic, and is not meant to imply that the line should necessarily be vocal in character, instead referring to instrumentation or simply to register.This field-specific meaning of "voice" is relevant for G10H1/18 selecting circuits; it is further defined in the definition of "polyphony" and in that of "part" - Sounds generated by vocal chords (e.g. human vocal folds) or synthetic versions thereof, e.g.: - as the medium of speech to communicate meaning; - for artistic musical purposes, e.g. with greater emphasis on melody or rhythm, as in singing, chorus, descant; or - for instrument control purposes (e.g. G10H5/005 voice controlled instruments) - Speech: Definite vocal sounds that form words to express thoughts and ideas - Part: In addition to the usual meaning, a piece of a whole, a part has three more preci se meanings in a musical sense:- A part is a strand or melody of music played by an individual instrument or voice (or group of identical instruments or voices) within a larger work. In the context of polyphonic composition the term voice may be used instead of part to denote a single melodic line or textural layer. This field-specific meaning is very commonly used in connection with MIDI - A part also refers to the separate printed or manuscript copies of the music for each individual instrument in an ensemble or orchestra, as distinct from the score, which holds the music for all the instruments.- A part in great Highland Bagpipe music is a musical strain or sentence. Usually each part consists of four phrases, either one or two bars long. Several sentences combine to produce a paragraph or complete work or tune. - Audio signal: An audio signal is a representation of sound, usually electrical, in analog, digital or coded form, without restriction as to the category of sound being represented, e.g. speech, music, noise, The category of sound being represented, e.g. speech, music or noise, is primarily defined with respect to the features of the audio signal and with respect to the main intent of the source or performer. This category, as defined in this glossary, is very relevant for proper classification