David Rector

The EMdrum, a drum electromagnetically actuated in the manner of a loudspeaker, is presented. Design principles are established and implementation is described; in particular, two alternative electromagnetic actuation designs, moving-coil and moving-magnet, are discussed. We evaluate the time-frequency response of the instrument and present a musical application.

A new branch of systematic musicology, “normative musicology,” is proposed and its practice demonstrated. Normative musicology is the study of optimal (“norma-tive”) expectations about future musical signals, given some corpus of past signals. It is a formalization of many “statistical learning” approaches (e.g. [1]) and may be considered a computational counterpart to empirical musicology.