Construction of a Music Database for Earphone Hearing Loss Prevention and Music Therapy - Discussions on the Relationship Between Beethoven's Music and His Deafness -

Abstract

A music database is indispensable for both basic research on earphone hearing loss prevention and music therapy. In this study, Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas and 16 string quartets are added to into the classical music genre of the database. And then, the relationship between his progress in hearing loss and the pitch distribution used in these works is discussed. Several elements are considered for the information that needs to be included in the music database: WAVE data and the corresponding spectrum obtained by FT analysis, musical score, and optional MIDI data, and the corresponding pitch distribution. The present study shows the following results. Both Beethoven's piano sonatas and string quartets have frequency characteristics close to the natural 1/f spectrum, which is comfortable and not dangerous to the ears. On the other hand, there are minor differences in the same classical music. For example, a string quartet can be effective in inducing sleep, and a piano sonata can be ear-friendly.

Keywords

• note pitch
• midi data
• fourier transform
• string quartets
• piano sonatas
• wave data