Uncertainty in Distinguishing between Structure and Ornamentation in Music

The paper focuses on the uncertainty inherent in the ornamentation/structure pair and on the role of uncertainty in characterizing style. We suggest that the ornamentation/structure pair be viewed as "complementary opposites" that fulfill three conditions: contradiction, support and identification. In computer simulations we perform a detailed harmonic analysis of a Prelude by J.S.Bach and suggest applicability of this for characterizing style. A full version of the paper is in ftp.cs.huji.ac.il:/pub/il-cmf/Uncertainty-Bach.ps 1 Introduction Ambiguity in music is increasingly preoccupying researchers in both retrospective and real-time analysis. In the first case, the ambiguity is caused by the disparity between the actual musical states and the dictates of analytical tools that rely on a theoretical model, and by the lack of a standard theory of ambiguity [1],[2],[14] ,[9] ,[16]. In the second case the ambiguity concerns the ability (or inability) to predict the continuation of the...