Nick Bailey
Nick Bailey is a Director of the
Centre for Music Technology and
is based in the Department of
Electronics and Electrical Engineering at The University of Glasgow.
Upon graduating from The University of Durham in 1987, he worked at British Telecom Applied Technology "Comms Division" writing bespoke software for BT's larger customers, and maintaining large databases on alarmingly obsolete mainframe computers. Thus equipped with a working knowledge of the unhappy bedfellows of applied signal processing and corporate computing, he left as soon as etiquette would permit to return to Durham to read for a Ph.D. in The Application of Parallel Computers to the Processing of Musical Signals.
Appointed Lecturer in Electronic Engineering at the University of Leeds, he was a founder member and Deputy Director of their Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music (ICSRiM).
In 2000, he moved to The University of Glasgow to take over the directorship of the Electronic Engineering aspect of the CMT.
Contact Details
Dr Nicholas Bailey
Director, Centre for Music Technology
Dept of Electronics & Electrical Enineering
University of Glasgow
Rankine Building
Oakfield Avenue
Glasgow G12 8LT
tel +44 (0)141 330 4903
Previous Positions
1986–1987: Executive Engineer, British Telecom PLC, BT Applied Technology Communications Group (non-executive since 1983).
1990–1991: Temporary Lecturer, School of Engineering and Computing Science, University of Durham.
1991–2000: Lecturer in Electronic Engineering, University of Leeds. Deputy Director and founder member of Leeds University's ICSRiM (Interdisciplinary Centre for Scientific Research in Music)
2000–Present: Senior Lecturer, Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, The University of Glasgow; Director, Glasgow University Centre for Music Technology.
A founder member and creator of n-ISM.
Ongoing Resarch Projects
Bogen
Empirical Study of Bowing Techniques in Bartok's Third String Quartet and other works. The Principal Investigator for this project is Carola Boehm (Head of Department of Contemporary Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University) Co-Investigators: Dr Amanda Bayley (Wolverhampton University); Prof Graham Hair.
Pierrot Lunaire
Empirical Study of Vocal Techniques in Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire The Principal Investigator for this project is Jane Manning (international soprano) Co-Investigators: Mr Ben Hillman and Prof Graham Hair.
Listening to Music: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Measurement, Analysis and Interpretation.
Conference and Colloquium Series, 2008&emdash;2010.
Performance Markup Language
Computer analysis of musical performance requires simultaneous consideration of the score and the resulting performance data, because interesting information about the performance is contained within a performer's inflections and departure from the strict score rather than in the measured performance information itself. A method of representing these and possibly many other aspects of a given performance is therefore required. Performance Markup Language (PML) is an open, extendable XML-based representation which is intended to be used as a basis for systems used to investigate elements of musical performance. It can be used to extend XML-based musical notation representations to include support for the representation of performance markup and analytical structures. Home page: http://www.n-ism.org/Projects/pml.php
Multimodal Analysis of the Performance of Chopin's B-flat minor Sonata Finale
Engineering measurement techniques are applied to acquire data from expert pianists playing the finale of the B-flat minor piano sonata opus 35. There are few formal analyses of this piece, which was famously described by Taniskin as the composer's "wild child". There is, however, a very large number of recordings extant, and the goal of this project is to analyse these as thoroughly and objectively as possible in order to discover any signs of an emergent performance tradition which might inform future analysis and performance. Multi-modal data acquisition, whereby audio, MIDI, video and gestural information of performances by expert musicians, is carried out in collaboration with the RSAMD in Glasgow and the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Selected Previous Research Projects
Animatics for the Web (2002–2004)
OpenDrama — The Digital Heritage of Opera in the Open Network Environment (2001–2004)
Rehearsing Microtonal Music: Grappling with Performance and Intonational Problems (2006–2007)
CIRCUS (Content-Integrated Research into Creative User Systems)
DMRN (Digital Music Research Network)
Selected Publications
Bryony Buck, Jennifer MacRitchie, Nicholas Bailey Performance Gesture as a Communication of Musical Structure Interdisciplinary Science Reviews: special journal issue on Music and the Sciences, March 2010.
Bryony Buck, Jennifer MacRitchie, Nicholas Bailey Perceptual recognition of embodied musical structure Musical Body Conference 2009, Institute for Music Research. IMR, University of London UK
Jennifer MacRitchie, Bryony Buck, Nicholas Bailey Visualising Musical Structure through Performance Gesture Proceedings of the 10th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, 26th-30th October 2009, Kobe, Japan
Jennifer MacRitchie, Bryony Buck, Nicholas Bailey Gestural Communication: Linking the Multi-Modal Analysis of Performance to Perception of Musical Structure Proceedings of the International Symposium of Performance Science Auckland, New Zealand
Jennifer MacRitchie, Stuart Pullinger, Graham Hair, Nicholas Bailey Communicating Phrasing Structure with Multi-Modal Expressive Techniques in Piano Performance Proceedings of The Second International Conference on Music Communication Science, 3-4 December 2009, Sydney, Australia
Invited Presentations
View Paper Informing Microtonal Performance through Listening with Alex South (clariettist) "The Anatomy of Listening" Colloquium, Glasgow University (2009).
Empirical Studies of Musical Performance: Measurement, Analysis & Interpretation with Graham Hair and Ben Hillman Grove Forum, Royal College of Music, London, January 15, 2009
Department of Adult and Continuing Education (DACE) Study Day with all contemporary CMT members Glasgow University, June 14, 2008
Released Software
Rosegarden Codicil
This is an interrim release of the Glasgow Pitch Tracker codicil for Rosegarden. If you are looking for a regular version of Rosegarden, the great MIDI sequencer for Linux, you should go to the main site at http://www.rosegardenmusic.com/. This released is based on an old version, modified slightly to compile and install on a modern Linux box (tested on Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty"). It will only be of any use to you if you intend to run experiments in systematic musicology, or need to use the microtonal real-time pitch trajectory analysis capability.
You can download what you need from this directory. For easy installation, please attend to the README file.
Technology Demonstrators
The Chopanalyser
A demonstration of capture of performance analysis and their presentation alongside the musical score. http://markov.music.gla.ac.uk/Click-Chopin/
The Microtonal Worm
A demonstration of the algorithm we use to locate note boundaries automatically. Works even for non-standard scales. http://markov.music.gla.ac.uk/Worm/