Music 253 Humdrum homework

Do some vocal-range analysis of J.S. Bach chorales.

See Getting started with Humdrum to access the Humdrum Tools.

You can download the Bach chorales by doing these commands in a terminal

     mkdir chorales
     cd chorales
     humsplit h://chorales

To see a list of the chorales:

     ls

or with more detail such as the size of the files:

     ls -asF

Question 1

Use the Humdrum Extras programs 'extractx' and 'prange' to calculate the number of notes each voice plays on each twelve-tone pitch in chor001.krn. Plot the pitch range data as a histogram for each voice in a plotting program of your choice.

Here is how to extract the first part from a file:

    extractx -f 1 chor001.krn

Or to explicitly extract by instrument name:

    extractx -g Bass chor001.krn

The output can either be saved to a file, and then processed with prange, or the data can be sent directly to prange:

    extractx -f 1 chor001.krn > temp-file
    prange temp-file

    extractx -f 1 chor001.krn | prange

Question 2

Try the “– –score” option for prange to generate SCORE data for pitch range histograms for each voice in chor001.krn. Print the SCORE output from prange for chor001.krn and a composite of all chorales.

    humcat chor001.krn | prange --score > chor001.pmx

Load the choral.pmx file into SCORE with the command:

    RE chor001.pmx

Question 3

Calculate and plot pitch histograms for each voice (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) in all 370 chorales. One histogram for each voice (not one for each chorale).

Extract all notes from all chorales like this (for Bass part):

   extractx -f 1 chor*.krn | prange

Also generate and print with SCORE similar plots:

       prange chor*.krn --score

Optional: add mouse hovering code to list the number of notes for each pitch

      prange chor*.krn --score --hover

Question 4

Based on the data/plots from question 3, what is the maximum and minimum pitch for each part in all of the chorales?

Question 5

What is the average twelve-tone pitch for each voice. What is the +/– 1 standard deviation range for each voice? What is the average pitch for each part?

Question 6

Extra credit: What is the 2-standard deviation of each voice's pitch range (the range of notes which covers 95% of the range that they sing).

This should be the Tessitura (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tessitura) of the vocal ranges. How does the measured tessitura match to standard listings for vocal ranges of soprano, alto, tenor, bass?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprano

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenor

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass