Abstract
Transforming Musicology is a three-year project undertaking musicological research exploring state-of-the-art computational methods in the areas of early modern vocal and instrumental music (mostly for lute), Wagner’s use of leitmotifs, and music as represented in the social media. An essential component of the work involves devising a semantic infrastructure which allows research data, results and methods to be published in a form that enables others to incorporate the research into their own discourse. This includes ways of capturing the processes of musicology in the form of ‘workflows’; in principle, these allow the processes to be repeated systematically using improved data, or on newly discovered sources as they emerge. A large part of the effort of Transforming Musicology (as with any digital research) is concerned with data preparation, which in the early music case described here means dealing with the outputs of optical music recognition software, which inevitably contain errors. This report describes in outline the process of correction and some of the web-based software which has been designed to make this as easy as possible for the musicologist.
Highlights
In particular we investigate the possible impact of three specific kinds of technology: Music Information Retrieval; Semantic Web technologies; and network analysis.[2]
The second core technology in Transforming Musicology is the so-called Semantic Web, which builds on the successful infrastructure of the World Wide Web
Crawford and M. d’Inverno, ‘Duplicate detection in facsimile scans of early printed music’, in Proceedings of the European Conference on Data Analysis (Bremen, 2014)
Summary
Audio recordings, which are effectively pre-encoded as digital data, have so many samples per second (typically 44,100 per second for each stereo channel) that the density of data is considerable, but this dense ‘content’ is not necessarily immediately musically useful. It needs to be reduced into more manageable ‘features’ which are suitable for the task in hand and intended to reflect aspects of the signal that are meaningful in an auditory or a musical sense. The ability to include, in principle, all surviving traces of a given repertory in an objective analysis, rather than relying on expert intuition for the pre-selection step that human-scale analysis demands, can be seen as one of the main potentials for transformation of the discipline of musicology.[19]
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