Recognizing the Bar Line
The barline is a notational construct that identifies the hierarchical structure inherent in a sequence of beats. That hierarchical structure has strong perceptual and musical effects – the difference between the most mundane 3 4 | 1 pattern in Western music and the highlife timeline is entirely due to the impact of a perceived (but otherwise silent) barline. Computational modeling often represents beat patterns as strings of one-bit variables, indicating whether a given timepoint is articulated by a beat or not. While this representation has been productive both analytically and generatively, what might be gained by an explicit encoding of the barline? How could such a representation include and expand upon existing techniques for measurement of similarity, among other tasks? This paper reviews the analytical and generative consequences of explicitly hierarchical representations of rhythm.
presentation slides available here