Music Collections Research Articles

Leybl as Tusovka

As in other peripheral music economies, hip-hop music-makers in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, self-organise their artistic labour in a context of “lack” of institutions and public support. This article takes a closer look at Bishkek’s hip-hop leybly, musical collectives that emerged around 2010. In order to highlight the particularities of these social formations and analyse their inner workings, I use the concept of tusovka – a slang term widely used in everyday Russian-speaking cultural communities. Building on previous conceptualisations of this term as a form of meeting-based, organic sociality, and drawing on two examples of hip-hop leybly in Bishkek I argue that the tusovka can make a theoretical contribution to the wider field of popular music studies in an attempt at “ex-centric” theory building.

“Psalmen in den Nacht”

“Psalmen in den Nacht”: 200 Years of Church Hymns created and sung in the Cape of Storms and the Cape of Good HopeJan van Riebeeck brought the Genevan Psalms with him to the Cape, setting the scene for the DRC’s church music development. By 1824, various faith groups have congregated in the Cape Colony, each introducing their religious music and practices. For the next two hundred years the officials connected to the Cape Synod would diligently collect and store the thousands of documents, hymnbooks, even musical instruments and technology relating the story of the DRC’s church music. In 2024 a comprehensive process of establishing an inclusive DRC Church Music Collection has been launched, requiring a re-focus to acknowledge influences and contributions from people and sources. This article highlights a few of the more unexpected findings, such as the contributions made by the fictional “Oom Willem Smit”; the “pastor of the Richtersveld”, Eerwaarde JF Hein; “ziekentrooster” Mother Machteldt Smit of the Cape and the revival singer Ira D Sankey and ABW-prisoner Willie Louw. Lastly, a few examples are given of the DRC’s pioneer missionaries’ influence on African indigenous music, such as the Chechewa Hymnbook.

PENGELOLAAN KOLEKSI MUSEUM MUSIK INDONESIA BERBASIS APLIKASI OPEN SOURCE

The Indonesian Music Museum stores various music collections in the form of cassettes, compact discs, vinyl records, and music-related books. This self-managed museum has the potential to become an institution that stores musical works from various countries. Management has been carried out properly, starting from inventory of collections to registration, but still manually. The implementation of the Senayan Library Management System (SLiMS), which is an open source based application, is one solution for managing collections more quickly and making it possible to access them remotely. The method used in this research is a qualitative study using observations and interviews so that it can produce an appropriate management system for the museum. The main informants are museum managers who are considered to understand the metadata needs of their museum collections. All results of observations and interviews are used as guidelines in determining any changes to the applications used to manage collections at the Indonesian Music Museum. This research produces an open source application-based museum collection inventory system. Several changes and adjustments were made to this application so that it could be implemented in the museum. Terms referring to library collections were changed and adapted to the use of terms relevant to music collections. The grouping of collections based on music genres and artists' regions of origin which is usually carried out by the museum is still maintained to become the characteristic of this museum itself. The Indonesian Music Museum can implement this application in a sustainable and long-term manner. Using this system helps the museum to obtain data records of collections and their movements, as well as inventory data on collections currently owned.

Instrumentale Melodieanfänge und ihr Verhältnis zur Form am Beispiel historischer und gegenwärtiger ungarischer Tanzmelodien

AbstractThe aim of this study is to analyze the beginning of different dance tunes in connection with variously performed dance tunes. The purpose of this paper is also to draw attention to the need for micro-analysis, which has been neglected for a long time in instrumental folk music research, in order to better understand instrumental musical melody creation. The selected musical examples come from different (partly historical) eras and different geographical areas of Western Transdanubian and Transylvanian Hungarian folk music collections. Typical starting elements (fifth-forth changes, direction of moving of scales, etc.) are related to dance music with different names. The analysis ignores the evolution of tempo and variation throughout the piece, as well as the ensemble's “Primas” ornamentation, timbre, harmonies and unique solutions of the accompaniment. At the same time, the author paid attention to the form and structure of the entire piece in addition to the beginnings of the melody. The study was written in honor of the 100th birthday of Walter Deutsch, the creator of modern Austrian ethnomusicology.

Back to the Wild Frontier(s): Osek, Waṅhal and the Nature of the 18th-Century Music Catalog

AbstractThe sizeable music collection from the Osek monastery has previously been interpreted in light of a catalog that was updated 1754–c1802. The completion of a modern catalog allows for a reappraisal of the history of the institution. Previous research has explained the lack of updates in the catalog during the years 1778–1802 with a decline in musical activity following the reforms of Joseph II. The collection, however, suggests that Jan Jakob Trautzl, regens chori since 1783, began his tenure by acquiring sacred works by Johann Baptist Waṅhal which rank among the largest and most ambitious from the era. There is also evidence of local adaptations of masses into polychoral and polyorchestral arrangements. Except for a possible low point during the years 1787–1789, the reforms thus seem to have had limited effect. The failure to accurately represent the collection in the catalog suggests the necessity for a new paradigm for reading such documents. One may preliminarily consider catalogs' limited potential for additions and emendations and understand them as tools for music professionals rather than librarians. In this view there is nothing surprising about lacunae, but the inclusion of a work becomes a sign of intent from the cataloger.

Surveying More Than Two Decades of Music Information Retrieval Research on Playlists

In this paper, we present an extensive survey of music information retrieval (MIR) research into music playlists. Our survey spans more than 20 years, and includes around 300 papers about playlists, with over 70 supporting sources. It is the first survey that is self-contained in the sense that it combines all the different MIR research into playlists. It embraces topics such as algorithms for automatic generation, for automatic continuation, for assisting with manual generation, for tagging and for captioning. It looks at manually constructed playlists, both those that are constructed for and by individuals, and those constructed in collaboration with others. It covers ground-breaking research into enhancing playlists by cross-fading consecutive songs and by interleaving consecutive songs with speech, similar to what happens on a radio show. Most significantly, it is the first survey that can fully incorporate the paradigm shift that has taken place in the way people consume recorded music: the shift from physical media to music streaming. This has wrought profound changes in the size of music collections available to listeners and thus the algorithms that support the construction, curation and presentation of playlists and the methods adopted by users when they also construct, curate and listen to playlists.

Selecting Printed Music in Public Libraries: A Committee-Driven Method for Curating Printed Music

ABSTRACT The height of the COVID-19 public health emergency saw libraries conducting collection audits of their materials, including their print music collections. The trend in contemporary public libraries in the United States is one which emphasizes generalization in its workforce regarding domain specialty knowledge and skills. This has necessitated an influx in inquiries delivered to the Music Library Association’s Public Libraries Committee on the topic of print music collection development from public library staff who lack the necessary training and experience. In response, the Public Libraries Committee created a document focusing on best practices in print music collection development that recommends 250 print music titles for public library acquisition. Selecting Printed Music in Public Libraries was produced using strategies similar to focus group research methods and addresses a novel dilemma found in public libraries – library workers tasked with managing music collections without the knowledge, skills, and abilities to effectively do so. This article is framed as a case study and offers an overview of the development of the Public Libraries Committee’s (PLC) document, Selecting Printed Music in Public Libraries. Additionally, this article describes the content included within the PLC’s document and offers recommendations for how to improve it moving forward.

Using knowledge graphs for audio retrieval: a case study on copyright infringement detection

Identifying cases of intellectual property violation in multimedia files poses significant challenges for the Internet infrastructure, especially when dealing with extensive document collections. Typically, techniques used to tackle such issues can be categorized into either of two groups: proactive and reactive approaches. This article introduces an approach combining both proactive and reactive solutions to remove illegal uploads on a platform while preventing legal uploads or modified versions of audio tracks, such as parodies, remixes or further types of edits. To achieve this, we have developed a rule-based focused crawler specifically designed to detect copyright infringement on audio files coupled with a visualization environment that maps the retrieved data on a knowledge graph to represent information extracted from audio files. Our system automatically scans multimedia files that are uploaded to a public collection when a user submits a search query, performing an audio information retrieval task only on files deemed legal. We present experimental results obtained from tests conducted by performing user queries on a large music collection, a subset of 25,000 songs and audio snippets obtained from the Free Music Archive library. The returned audio tracks have an associated Similarity Score, a metric we use to determine the quality of the adversarial searches executed by the system. We then proceed with discussing the effectiveness and efficiency of different settings of our proposed system.Graphical abstract

Spotlight on Music Collections: Interview with Marion Newman, (Ne'ega,) Mezzo-Soprano

Spotlight on Music Collections: Interview with Marion Newman, (Ne'ega,) Mezzo-Soprano

Music Collection Development and Management in the Digital Age by Kirstin Dougan Johnson (review)

Music Collection Development and Management in the Digital Age by Kirstin Dougan Johnson (review)

Musical Instrument Identification Using Machine Learning

Music is a beautiful form of expression that is universally understood. In fact, people across all cultural backgrounds, even those without extensive exposure to musical education, can easily recognize the unique sounds of different instruments. This paper explores the use of machine learning to identify various instruments. The scope of this project focuses on audio recordings with one instrument playing one pitch, and the specific instruments in this study were viola, piano, and ukulele. This paper analyzes ways to quantify the differences in sounds of instruments using the harmonic frequency content apparent in spectrograms. It proposes the use of a simple but efficient K-Nearest-Neighbors machine learning algorithm. The results achieved 80% accuracy; using a larger dataset and using convolutional neural networks could improve accuracy of classification. The machine learning algorithm can be applied to the broader world of sound classification, and it can eventually surpass a human’s ability at identifying sounds (e.g. telling apart viola from violin, which the average human cannot do). There are numerous real-world applications for musical instrument recognition. It can enable automatic sorting and searching of massive musical collections with ease, which could be useful to streaming platforms that provide personalized recommendations to their users.

Predictive Music Based on Mood

It is often difficult for a person to choose which mu- sic to listen to from a vast array of available options. Relatively, this paper focuses on building an efficient music recommendation system based on the user’s mood which determines the emotion of user using Facial Recognition technique. The model is build using the transfer learning approach for which MobileNet model and Cascade classifier are used. Analyzing the user’s face expression might help you better comprehend their current emotional or mental condition. Music and video are one area where there is a lot of potential to present clients with a variety of options depending on their interests and data. More than 60% of users anticipate that the number of songs in their music collection will grow to the point where they will be unable to find the song they need to play at some point in the future. The user would save time by not having to search for or look up tunes. The image of the user is captured using a webcam. Then, depending on the user’s mood, an appropriate song from the user’s playlist or a movie is shown.

Emigrant Songs of Ukrainians in the Context of Scientific Research of Robert Klymasz (Canada)

The purpose of the research is to analyse the genre and thematic, musical component and peculiarities of the transformation of emigrant songs from the collections of folk songs Introduction to the Ukrainian-Canadian Immigrant Folklore Cycle and Ukrainian Folk Songs from the Prairies by R. Klimasz (Canada). The research methodology is based on the principles of objectivity, systematicity and historicism, which is supported by the historical and cultural approach. The musicological, textual, stylistic, and contextual analyses are applied, which reveal the musical, literary, historical and cultural dimensions of the evolution of emigrant songs, and also allow us to identify the transformation of emigrant songs in new socio-cultural conditions. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the introduction into scientific circulation of the collections of sheet music of the Canadian-Ukrainian folklorist R. Klymasz, which contain samples of emigrant songs of Ukrainians in Canada as authentic musical folklore of Ukrainian immigrants in the context of studying the transformation of the musical folklore tradition of Ukrainians in the North American diaspora. Conclusions. The emigrant songs collected and published by R. Klymash, created among overseas emigrants, are part of the cultural heritage of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America, which consists of epic stories, song lyrics, and humorous and satirical dance songs. The folk song materials clearly demonstrate the current themes, melodic, rhythmic and harmonic aspects of the musical component, and the contexts of performance. The musical and poetic style of the songs expresses the peculiarities of the music of the western region of Ukraine with its respective linguistic dialects. Examples of emigrant folklore reflect the diachronic development of the song culture of Ukrainians in the diaspora from the creation of emigrant songs as authentic examples of immigrant folklore with gradual modification to complete assimilation into another cultural environment, which is expressed in the change of content of the works, the use of macaronic elements in the texts, and later – melodic borrowings.

The Weston Park Music Collection: Five Generations of Family Music-Making in Eighteenth-Century Staffordshire

Abstract The activities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century music collectors help to chart the development of the period’s canon and understand the connections between consumers as amateur musicians and collectors and the composers and their music. In 2014, a collection of music came to light at the ancestral seat of the Earls of Bradford, Weston Park in Shropshire, which reveals a scenario of amateur music-making intrinsically linked to the wider professional scene. This collection has been largely ignored due to its unbound state in a private residence. It is of importance for its association with the five generations of the Bridgeman family, and for numerous manuscripts of previously unknown cello works; but crucially, the presence of four manuscript catalogues, a teacher’s bill for music, and an auction sale catalogue dating from the time, helps to fill in the gaps of what was being performed in the house, by whom, where, and when. This article describes seven sources connected with family music-making and presents a catalogue of the current music collection at Weston Park as supplementary material in the form of a data set in an Excel spreadsheet. Readers can consult the collection as it stands today and how it developed over 150 years.

Music Genre Classification Using K-Nearest Neighbor and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients

Music genre classification plays a pivotal role in organizing and accessing vast music collections, enhancing user experiences, and enabling efficient music recommendation systems. This study focuses on employing the K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) algorithm in conjunction with Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs) for accurate music genre classification. MFCCs extract essential spectral features from audio signals, which serve as robust representations of music characteristics. The proposed approach achieves a commendable classification accuracy of 80%, showcasing the effectiveness of KNN-MFCC fusion. Nevertheless, the challenge of overlapping genres, particularly rock and country, demands special attention due to their shared acoustic attributes. The inherent similarities between these genres often lead to misclassification, hampering accuracy. To address this issue, an enhanced feature engineering strategy is devised, leveraging deeper insights into the subtle nuances that differentiate rock and country music. Additionally, a refined KNN distance metric and neighbor selection mechanism are introduced to further refine classification decisions. Experimental results underscore the effectiveness of the refined approach in mitigating genre overlap issues, significantly enhancing classification accuracy for rock and country genres. This study contributes to the advancement of music genre classification techniques, offering an innovative solution for handling overlapping genres and demonstrating the potential of KNN-MFCC synergy in achieving accurate and refined genre classification.

Turkish folk songs in Greek musical collections of the late Ottoman era

During the late Ottoman period, there was a great deal of interest in folk culture. After all, this was a period when the various ethno-religious communities of the Ottoman Empire began to form national states, such as Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Serbia. At the same time, the Ottoman state turned its attention to the Turkish people and began to shape the Turkish national identity in order to create a sense of unity among the Turkish-speaking Muslim community. In this effort to cultivate the national identity of the people, religion and folk culture were fully exploited. This study examines the musical collections published by the Greek Orthodox Christian community of the Ottoman Empire, specifically the Efterpi (1830), Pandora (1843), Mecmua-yı Makamat (1856 & 1872-1873), Kallifonos Sirin (1859 & 1888) and Music Journal (1896) editions. These collections were printed in Istanbul and addressed to Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians. They consist mainly of Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical music, Greek secular music, and some Greek folk songs. Interestingly, the collections additionally include Ottoman music and Turkish folk music. It should be noted that the main language of the collections is Greek, and some Karamanlidika, and the musical transcriptions have been written down in Byzantine notation. This paper presents data on these transcriptions. The songs are transnotated from Byzantine notation to Turkish staff notation. 3 of these transnotations are presented here. After this process, different results are obtained regarding the way the songs were transcribed by the Rum musicians in comparison to their transcriptions by Turkish musicians of a later period.

How Libraries Can Foster a Vibrant Local Music Community

This column outlines how libraries can add value to their both their digital offerings and programming while providing local music artists with a curated, low-barrier entrance into streaming media. Library-hosted digital music collections give up-and-coming artists increased exposure and credibility to listeners and open a wealth of opportunities to engage with their communities.

STREAMING MUSIK SEBAGAI KONSTRUKSI IDENTITAS (SEBUAH KAJIAN LITERATUR)

In the current digital era, it is incredibly simple to appreciate music. It is now possible to enjoy music without purchasing CDs, cassettes, or even black plates. The availability of music streaming services has rendered internet connectivity the sole requirement for unrestricted music listening. Thus, music can be utilised to accompany daily activities as background music. Prior studies have indicated that an individual's identity might be discernible through the music collection hosted on a music streaming platform. This literary study aims to investigate the process of identity formation through music streaming services, drawing on past research and the social construction theory proposed by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Internalisation, externalisation, and objectivation are the three dialectical moments of social construction that occur during the identity formation process via the music streaming service, according to this literary analysis. The moments of introspection an individual experiences while listening to music on a personalised streaming service are compiled into a playlist that contributes to the formation of one's sense of self. When identical identities are present in a society, objectivation ensues, resulting in the formation of a new social identity

Scoring, Casting, Instilling

Abstract Ari Benjamin Meyers's Kunsthalle for Music is simultaneously an institution, an exhibition, a concert, a music collection, a process, and an ensemble. In this essay, I take readers on a tour of the show's first presentation, followed by reflections on questions that it posed. In particular, the project troubles the issue of art's mediums, their relation to art as a singular concept and its institutional form(s), and art's mode of cultural transmission through time. The philosopher Peter Osborne, who has written on and presented at the Kunsthalle, provides my theoretical foil alongside Theodor Adorno and Rosalind Krauss. I add musings by Jean-Luc Nancy to consider how the project exhibits liveness and its musical significance. Mediums of art are neither essences nor concepts for deconstruction, I conclude; rather, they insist and persist as modalities of action.

Formation of the genre of clavier sonata in Austria: sonatas by Leopold Kozeluch (from the music collection of the Razumovskys)

The article examines the period of European culture associated with the formation of the Viennese Classical School in Austria. The transition of music from the baroque to the classical style in the second half of the 18th century was marked by the work of some composers, whose works received various names of stylistic movements, such as “Storm and Wind”, or names specific to the style of orientation of these movements – gallant, sentimental or mixed. A special place in the constellation of composers from this period belongs to Leopold Kozeluch (1747-1818), Czech by origin, who received a selected education in Prague and Vienna, being a student of F. Dušek and A. Salieri. Later, Leopold Kozeluchva occupied a place of honor in Austrian musical culture. Among the numerous works for harpsichord and other instruments signed by Leopold Kozeluch, the Three Sonatas dedicated to Princess Liechtenstein are of particular interest, due not only to the musical material of the sonatas themselves, which reproduce the solemn theme of J. Brahms’ work, but also, directly, to the person to whom they are dedicated – the Princess of Liechtenstein. The Three Sonatas in three movements can form an integral cycle, determined by the internal logic of the unfolding of the events, but they can also be interpreted separately, undoubtedly representing significant individual artistic values.