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Nonlinearities and Self-organization are basic principles of many aspects of music production and perception, tone production of musical instruments, perception of timbre, movement, or tonality. This self-organizing nature is responsible for many musical instruments to play harmonic overtone series at all, leads to the tone development within the initial transient phase of tones, and is a basis for articulation and performance. In terms of movement, synergetic models are most suitable to explain sudden changes in performance and rhythmic patterns. Also with timbre, tone, and tonality perception, self-organizing models are very close to neural networks and so able to model perception as known from listeners accurately. Therefore, understanding musical performance needs close examination of the nonlinear and synergetic effects present in musical acoustics and music psychology. The paper also suggests an Impulse Pattern Formulation (IPF) as a basic production scheme of musical tones which comes very close to real musical instrument behavior, both in its steady-state as well as the transient phase of played notes.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-00107-4_1

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