Music 824: Computer Applications in Music Research
Ohio State University
School of Music



Humdrum Exercise #10


For this exercise you will need to know the following new commands:

UNIX Commands Humdrum Commands
assemble
timebase
   

Change directories to /var/share/Humdrum/Music824/misc and answer the following questions. For each question, keep a record of both the answer, and the command(s) used to find your answer.

  1. Assemble the melody ("happy") and lyrics ("birthday") for the song "Happy Birthday".
    COMMAND:   assemble happy birthday
  2. Assemble the melody and lyrics for "Happy Birthday" so that the lyrics appear in the left-most spine and the music appears in the right-most spine.
    COMMAND:   assemble birthday happy
  3. The file "harmony" contains a harmonic accompaniment for "Happy Birthday". Using the timebase command, expand the accompaniment so that each data record represents a 16th duration. Save the output in the file "/tmp/yourname".
    COMMAND:   timebase -t 16 harmony > /tmp/yourname
  4. Assemble the melody ("happy") with the harmonic accompaniment into a single output with the melody in the left-most spine. Remove any null data records.
    COMMAND:   timebase -t 16 happy > /tmp/yourname.happy
                              assemble /tmp/yourname.happy /tmp/yourname | rid -d
  5. When using timebase to expand a passage, it is useful to determine the shortest duration value in a file. What Humdrum command should be used to determine the shortest duration in a file?
    ANSWER:       The census -k command.
  6. Suppose we would like to assemble two files. The shortest note in the first file is a sixteenth. The shortest note in the second file is a dotted quarter. Which timebase value should we use to assemble the files?
    ANSWER:       16
  7. Suppose we would like to assemble two files. The shortest note in the first file is a triplet eighth (12th note). The shortest note in the second file is a sixteenth. Which timebase value should we use to assemble the files?
    ANSWER:       48 or 96
  8. Suppose we want to assemble 20 files named opus12.a.krn, opus12.b.krn opus12.c.krn ... opus12.t.krn. What is the easiest command for assembling all files at once?
    COMMAND:   assemble opus12.*.krn

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