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Humdrum Toolkit

  • Introduction
  • Demonstrations of Humdrum's Capabilities
  • Humdrum FAQ
  • Everything You Need to Know About The Humdrum **kern Representation
  • Examples of Traditional Notation with **kern Encodings
  • Humdrum Newsletter
  • Inventory of Works Encoded in Humdrum Format
  • Review of Humdrum in Music Theory Online, vol. 2.7 and other stuff

    Introduction

    The Humdrum Toolkit provides a set of inter-related software tools intended to assist in music research. The toolkit is suitable for use in a wide variety of computer-based musical investigations. The toolkit is less well suited to creative (i.e. generative) musical tasks -- such as electroacoustic composition.

    Humdrum is a general-purpose software system intended to assist music researchers in posing and answering research questions. Humdrum's capabilities are quite abstract, and so it is difficult to characterize precisely what it can do. Humdrum can encode information in an unbounded variety of forms. It can transform, classify, coordinate, search, transfer, restructure, contextualize, compare, and otherwise manipulate both pre-defined and user-defined information.

    Humdrum will be of potential benefit to anyone wishing to pursue systematic investigations of musical information. This includes the posing of factual questions about music and the testing of hypotheses about musical organization. Humdrum may thus prove to be of use to music theorists, music analysts, ethnomusicologists, historical musicologists, psychomusicologists, music librarians, dance scholars, linguists, and others.

    -- from The Humdrum Toolkit Reference Manual, copyright © 1994 David Huron

    For additional information, see the Humdrum FAQ, the demonstration files, and the Humdrum Newsletter.

    Humdrum Toolkit Demonstration

    N.B. The following information is excerpted from the demonstration files provided with Humdrum. Each of these files is a script, performing its calculations in real time and producting the output given here. Each of the lines that perform a calculation are indicated by emphasized type. Only the examples NOT requiring a MIDI installation are provided here. For a complete demonstration, including MIDI capabilities, please come by the Digital Media Center.

    Please Note: These sample problems are intended for illustrative purposes only. They are not intended to be carefully constructed scholarly arguments.


    Humdrum Newsletter


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