University of Minnesota researchers and music theory professors bring forth research from the past and present while delving into book projects.

Music theory encapsulates the symbolic representation of musical objects, instrumentals, sound control and composer-to-audience communication, while also recognizing mass media influences and commercial elements, professor of performance theory Guernio Mazzola said.

When taken into consideration with cultural aspects, music theory research can help explain why certain music can be considered “good” or “bad.”

Artificial intelligence in music can take away creativity

Mazzola is a researcher and publicist working within the School of Music. He has written more than 32 books and said he is most proud of his four-volume series called “The Topos of Music,” which encapsulates mathematical theories, gestures, performance, harmony and more.

“That’s a series I have been working on for six years, and I’m very proud because there are many theories within them,” Mazzola said.

Mazzola said no one really knows of a theory that tells one how to write successful music because it is dependent on the cultural context. For example, in a place like the Alps in Switzerland, the harmonicas are a large aspect of their definition of good music, Mazzola said.

Rather than subjectively naming a piece as “good” or” bad,” Mazzola said measuring and analyzing the sequence of sounds is a common gauge.

“What you have to do is to look at how the sequence is constructed,” Mazzola said. “You take a sequence of three of these kinds of very small motifs, and the melody will be a patchwork of these small parts.”

The use of software and artificial intelligence within the music industry is increasingly becoming a problem that produces copies or near copies of music or rhythms, Mazzola said.

“The human aspect of creativity, to me, is absolutely central,” Mazzola said. “If you forget about the human, meaning and connection is taken away, and that’s also the problem of artificial intelligence.”

Research findings and published works

Gopinath has recently conducted research on country musicians and the politics of race within their music products. He examined the song “Broad Minded” by the Louvin Brothers, a duo that releases the song in 1953.

“My study of their music shows that sinful behavior is typically depicted using music and musical features associated with Black musical practices, and often have the effect of being enticing as much as they are overtly depicted as negative,” Gopinath said in an email to the Minnesota Daily.

Recently, Gopinath published a chapter on the concept of sound within digital watches, in a book called “Media Infrastructures and the Politics of Digital Time.” Regarding the element of sound, Gopinath found the beeping on the watch is derived from the frequency of the quartz crystal, with a pitch of a high B or low C.

Gopinath’s book project, “Music Minimalism,” investigates how to think critically about these types of music.

“[Music minimalism] features either long sustained tones called ‘drones,’ or short repeated musical figures/passages or both and is directly influenced by non-Western musics,” Gopinath said.

A long-time passion, seeking out diversity, subjectivity

Matthew Bribitzer-Stull, professor of theory and composition, first began asking theoretical questions about music in high school, when his French horn teacher began to ask students to study theory outside of class. He wanted to know why he gravitated toward certain pieces.

“Music theory is an incredibly wide-ranging and interdisciplinary study, and at its heart, concerned with the materials of music and musical objects,” Bribitzer-Stull said in an email to the Daily.

Bribitzer-Stull served on the Society for Music Theory (SMT) Diversity Committee to work toward more inclusivity from diverse backgrounds within music research topics.

“Music theory in the U.S. has been, until recently, largely grounded in the white, European tradition of concert music,” Bribitzer-Stull said.

What deems music “good” or “bad” is highly dependent on the listener, Bribitzer-Stull said. He said the opinion of enjoyment is separate from compositional technique because you can speak upon expressive force and novelty.