The Games We Play: Exploring the Impact of ISMIR on Musicology (original) (raw)
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Big Data and Musicology: New Methods, New Questions
Big Data" is a ubiquitous topic these days, both outside and inside the academy. Indeed, new sources of digital information are beginning to make their way into the humanitiesmusicology included-raising many complex, sometimes uncomfortable questions. In my talk this evening, I want to explore what the rapid digitization of musical information in the form of Big Data will mean for musicology, 1 and more specifically, what it will mean for graduate students coming of scholarly age in this dynamic digital moment. [Since time is short, I'm going to keep my comments more to the general, conceptual level and save specifics for the discussion] The somewhat vague term "Big Data analytics" can refer to any number of computational techniques for finding patterns in very large amounts of information, usually-for our purposes-in the form of databases of notated and recorded music, documentary sources, and Internet content. These new digital resources present us with the opportunity to get our hands on previously unimaginable amounts of musical information. But what will we do with all this new information? Herein lies the rub: There is currently a skills gap between what is technologically possible and what is intelligible given the training of most musicologists. Indeed, we can mine music databases or the Internet for petabytes worth of juicy raw data, but without a background in data analysis and statistics, we won't be able make heads or tails of it all. And in this vacuum comes the possibility that other researchers without a disciplinary background in musicology will come to dominate this brave new digital world, with some highly questionable results.
jims, 2009
In the past century melodic variation caused by oral transmission has been studied within the discipline of Folk Song Research (FSR). Also, various systems have been developed to categorize large collections of folk songs. Since the 1940s many attempts have been made to design automatic systems to categorize melodies. However, after several decades, no strong theories of oral transmission, and no generally applicable classification systems have yet emerged. Currently, many cultural heritage institutions give high priority to the digitization and unlocking of their (musical) collections.
musicSpace: Improving Access to Musicological Data
2010
Not unlike the sciences, musicological data is widely distributed and exists in numerous formats and in many databases. Efforts over the past decade to digitize bibliographies, artists' works lists, recordings, program guides and related ephemera should mean that data that was once physically distributed (requiring a researcher to visit various sites to consult items) is all readily accessible from the comfort of one's desktop. But this has not entirely been the case: the geographical dispersal of material in
CALL FOR REGISTRATION: The 12th UPM International Colloquium for Music Research (ICMus19)
With an anticipation to invite stimulating ideas in academic content and also the sustainable mechanism of the academic event in the long run, the the Department of Music with the support of Faculty of Human Ecology, Universiti Putra Malaysia warmly welcome you to gather in the 12th UPM International Colloquium for Music Resaearch (ICMus19), which will takes place in Kuala Lumpur - Serdang from October 31 till November 2, 2019. Numerous local and international academicians will present their papers as research outcomes of broad topics in music and also music-related fields, despite scholarly discussions by 2 invited keynote speakers, namely Prof. Dr. Yu Hui from Yunnan University, China, and Mr. Eddin Khoo, the Director-Founder of Pusaka, Malaysia. Scholarly discussions and presentations are to revolve the main theme of "Music and the Cosmos", while scholarship of novel research frameworks, methodologies, analysis and interpretation of the topic on music studies in line with the wide coverage of the sub-themes of this colloquium as highlighted below: 1. Interpreting an organised sound in a world-system: A world-system, in the general sense, has established or been establishing cultural, social, economic, political and techno spheres. The expression from music practices in the system delivers to the spheres a defining landscape illustrated with senses, order, reasoning and ideas that reflect the kind of the world the music exists. In this context, we question how an organised sound can be linked to the world it is meant to belong to, and how the carriers of the music practice connect themselves to the world, the universe, or the cosmos. Within this universal view, we encourage discussions on the scientific, cultural, or philosophical observation on the music in macrocosmos or microcosmos and its nature or reasons in existence, or on an intellectual discourse of a typical system as observed in such an organised sound. The discussion can also stretch into connecting ideas in organised sounds, as well as interpretations of interconnectivity of things with music or sound in a world-system. 2. Cosmopolitanism as a way of knowing about music: In the narratives of musicological scholarship, frameworks based of facts on obligatory affiliations, such as culture and nation in particular, are difficult to avoid or refrain from. However, from cosmos to cosmopolitanism with ‘localisation’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘glocalisation’ of music practices in mind, we look into the alternatives in the narratives of music across the dimension of space or time that embrace views of cosmopolitanism as a way of knowing about music. How is the knowledge on certain music practices constructed through the world view of carriers and practitioners with the status of ‘world citizen’? How does the approach of decolonisation influence ways of knowing music scientifically and artistically? And how difficult is it to achieve this notion? We welcome discussions on methodological strategies or a reconstruction of scholarship frameworks in light of the idea of cosmopolitanism. 3. Musicking in the digital age: Humans claim to have been advancing into a ‘new’, digital age when almost every single act in life involves a digital element. Living in a digital world and time, modern people seem to be universally driven with the phenomenal idea of ‘digitalisation’, and musicking in this age and time seems no different. When almost everything about music is digitalised, how obscure have all geographical boundaries in the world become? And what impact does time still have on music and the act of musicking? From electronica, electrophones, electroacoustic enhancements, digital workstations to the act of digital documentation of the musicking process including the application of computer-mediated communication and ‘cloud’ computing tools, we would like to hear about the research findings in light of a seemingly new and unchartered puzzle on the problematisation of the subject matter. 4. New Research: Any music- or sound-related investigations, projects, new findings of individual research or interdisciplinary fields within the broad area of ‘new research’ are welcomed. Please continue reading the attached document for methods of registration, fee payment and other linked activities of this colloquium. Any queries, please contact icmus.upm@gmail.com.
From Network to Research – Ten Years of Music Informatics, Performance and Aesthetics
Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, 2012
This article briefly chronicles the history of the Nordic Network of Music Informatics, Performance and Aesthetics (NNIMIPA) and its roots in previous research networks and milieus. It explains how a cross-disciplinary network works and gives rise to research projects that bridge the gap between the disciplines involved. As examples, three thematically linked projects within NNIMIPA are presented. These projects all have performance interaction (between musicians and between musician and audience) as their nexus.
Music Information Retrieval and Contemporary Classical Music: A Successful Failure
2020
This paper is about the story of my relationship, as a contemporary music composer, with computational tools that are situated in the areas of signal processing, machine learning and music information retrieval (MIR). I believe that sharing this story can be useful to the MIR community since it illustrates the problems that can arise when you try to use these techniques in the context of contemporary music creation. Since this is a personal story, I will refer to experiences that I had during about fifteen years of usage of MIR-related technologies. I will show how these technologies tried to (unsuccessfully) shape my musical thinking and why I believe that some of them have come to an end. Finally, I will propose new possible directions for the future of MIR.
The Implications of Digital Music Libraries for Music Theory
2015
segmentation tasks, and demonstrated it using works from the standard atonal repertory. • In the early 1970s, Steven Smoliar developed a LISP-based system to study how Schenkerian theory could be implemented using a linguistically-motivated augmented transition network. • In the late 70s, Aleck Brinkman developed a computer-based system for tracing motives and their transformations through the many preludes in Bach’s Orgelbüchlein. • In the mid-80s, John Maxwell developed a rule-based expert system to analyze keyboard dance movements by J. S. Bach. His analyses focused on three movements from the French Suites. • In the late 80s, Robert Gjerdingen devised a neural network system that learned to recognize and anticipate various harmonic and contrapuntal features in several of Mozart’s juvenilia for piano. • Also in the late 80s, John Roeder created a knowledge-based system in Prolog to perform automated score segmentation tasks in atonal works. • Around 1990, Brinkman and Martha Mesi...
Music as Data in the Twenty-First Century
2017
In “Forum: Defining Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Music,” ed. David Clarke, Twentieth-Century Music 14/3 (2017), 411–462. My excerpt is on 448–452. Explains the continuities and discontinuities between twentieth-century models of music distribution and the contemporary, digitized one. Argues that the digitization of music and its transformation into a product for data capture is a fundamental dividing line between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the history of music.