Browsing by Author "Malila, Saara"

The presence of 1/f type noise in a variety of natural processes and human cognition is a well-established fact, and methods of analysing it are many. Fractal analysis of time series data has long been subject to limitations due to the inaccuracy of results for small datasets and finite data. The development of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms over the recent years have opened the door to modeling and forecasting such phenomena as well which we do not yet have a complete understanding of. In this thesis principal component analysis is used to detect 1/f noise patterns in human-played drum beats typical to a style of playing. In the future, this type of analysis could be used to construct drum machines that mimic the fluctuations in timing associated with a certain characteristic in human-played music such as genre, era, or musician. In this study the link between 1/f-noisy patterns of fluctuations in timing and the technical skill level of the musician is researched. Samples of isolated drum tracks are collected and split into two groups representing either low or high level of technical skill. Time series vectors are then constructed by hand to depict the actual timing of the human-played beats. Difference vectors are then created for analysis by using the least-squares method to find the corresponding "perfect" beat and subtracting them from the collected data. These resulting data illustrate the deviation of the actual playing from the beat according to a metronome. A principal component analysis algorithm is then run on the power spectra of the difference vectors to detect points of correlation within different subsets of the data, with the focus being on the two groups mentioned earlier. Finally, we attempt to fit a 1/f noise model to the principal component scores of the power spectra. The results of the study support our hypothesis but their interpretation on this scale appears subjective. We find that the principal component of the power spectra of the more skilled musicians' samples can be approximated by the function $S=1/f^{\alpha}$ with $\alpha\in(0,2)$, which is indicative of fractal noise. Although the less skilled group's samples do not appear to contain 1/f-noisy fluctuations, its subsets do quite consistently. The opposite is true for the first-mentioned dataset. All in all, we find that a much larger dataset is required to construct a reliable model of human error in recorded music, but with the small amount of data in this study we show that we can indeed detect and isolate defining rhythmic characteristics to a certain style of playing drums.