Web Tools

Search Engines

We develop two pattern search engines with many options and features.

• Dig That Lick Pattern Search. Allows searching the Weimar Jazz Database for patterns of many types (pitch, interval, chordal pitch class and many more). Includes regular expressions, two-staged search, and metadata filters. Returns audio and score representations of pattern instances for easy exploration.

• Dig That Lick Pattern Similarity Search. Allows searching the Weimar Jazz Database for similar patterns. Includes metadata and feature filters, search history, audio playback and cool visualizations.

Shiny Apps

For better exploration of our data sets, mainly the Weimar Jazz Database and the Parker Omnibook, we developed some Shiny apps that allow interactive visualizations. Since this is an efficient, intuitive and attractive way to “get a feel” for the data and also to generate hypotheses, we plan to expand the list of interactive visualizations in the future.

• Parker Pattern Explorer. Here, all pitch patterns as can be found in the 53 solos of the Parker Omnibook are presented as pseudo-phase plots (or bigram plots), which neatly demonstrates the spiral nature of many of Parker’s patterns. Check also Klaus Frieler’s talk on Parker’s usage of patterns.

• Pattern History Explorer. Explore 653 common interval patterns with over 11,000 instances and see how they are distributed over the time and players in the Weimar Jazz Database. Includes score and audio snippets of the instances as well as various statistical and content-based descriptors of the patterns.

• Feature History Explorer. Explore the evolution of a large set of melodic features for 456 jazz solos from 1925 to 2009.