The Relevance of Digital Humanities to the Analysis of late Medieval/Early Renaissance Music

In a seminal publication on computational and comparative musicology, Nicholas Cook argued more than a decade ago that recent developments in computational musicology presented a significant opportunity for disciplinary renewal. Musicology, he said, was on the brink of new phase wherein “objective representations of music” could be rapidly and accurately compared and analysed using computers. Cook’s largely retrospective conspectus of what I and others now call digital musicology— following the vogue of digital humanities—might seem prophetical, yet in other ways it cannot be faulted for missing its mark when it came to developments in the following decade. While Cook laid the blame for its delayed advent on the cultural turn in musicology, digital musicology today—which is more a way of enhancing musicological research than a particular approach in its own right—is on the brink of another revolution of sorts that promises to bring diverse disciplinary branches closer together. In addition to the extension of types of computer-assisted analysis already familiar to Cook, new generic models of data capable of linking music, image (including digitisations of music notation), sound and documentation are poised to leverage musicology into the age of the semantic World Wide Web. At the same time, advanced forms of computer modelling are being developed that simulate historical modes of listening and improvisation, thereby beginning to address research questions relevant to current debates in music cognition, music psychology and cultural studies, and musical creativity in the Middle Ages, Renaissance and beyond

MuSO: Aggregation and Peer Review in Music

This Level I project will fund a two-day workshop at Texas A&M University for 15 software engineers, music librarians, music encoding specialists, and music scholars from the U.S., Canada and abroad that will lay the foundation to launch MuSO (Music Scholarship Online). Using the period-specific virtual research environments, or research nodes, of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) as templates, this workshop will establish methods for aggregating and evaluating digital projects in the fields of music analysis, culture, history and literature. The workshop will address the metadata needs for media such as musical scores and audio recordings, and it will establish a standard and process for peer reviewing the projects that contribute to and participate in MuSO. The funded workshop will therefore produce a list of changes to the ARC metadata guidelines as well as a method for evaluating digital projects in music

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021, 19–22 July, 2021 University of Alicante (Spain): Onsite & Online

Este documento incluye los artículos y pósters presentados en el Music Encoding Conference 2021 realizado en Alicante entre el 19 y el 22 de julio de 2022.Funded by project Multiscore, MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103

Scholarly Music Editions as Graph: Semantic Modelling of the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe

This paper presents a first draft of the ongoing research at the Anton Webern Gesamt- ausgabe (Basel, CH) to apply RDF-based semantic models for the purpose of a scholarly digital music edition. A brief overview of different historical positions to approach music from a graph-theoretical perspective is followed by a list of music- related and other RDF vocabularies that may support this goal, such as MusicOWL, DoReMus, CIDOC CRMinf, or the NIE-INE ontologies. Using the example of some of Webern’s sketches for two drafted Goethe settings (M306 & M307), a preliminary graph-based model for philological knowledge and processes is envisioned, which incorporates existing ontologies from the context of cultural heritage and music. Finally, possible use-cases, and the consequences of such an approach to scholarly music editions, are discussed

Applying Automatic Translation for Optical Music Recognition’s Encoding Step

Optical music recognition is a research field whose efforts have been mainly focused, due to the difficulties involved in its processes, on document and image recognition. However, there is a final step after the recognition phase that has not been properly addressed or discussed, and which is relevant to obtaining a standard digital score from the recognition process: the step of encoding data into a standard file format. In this paper, we address this task by proposing and evaluating the feasibility of using machine translation techniques, using statistical approaches and neural systems, to automatically convert the results of graphical encoding recognition into a standard semantic format, which can be exported as a digital score. We also discuss the implications, challenges and details to be taken into account when applying machine translation techniques to music languages, which are very different from natural human languages. This needs to be addressed prior to performing experiments and has not been reported in previous works. We also describe and detail experimental results, and conclude that applying machine translation techniques is a suitable solution for this task, as they have proven to obtain robust results.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry HISPAMUS project TIN2017-86576-R, partially funded by the EU, and by the Generalitat Valenciana through project GV/2020/030

Scholarly Music Editions as Graph: Semantic Modelling of the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe

This paper presents a first draft of the ongoing research at the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe (Basel, CH) to apply RDF-based semantic models for the purpose of a scholarly digital music edition. A brief overview of different historical positions to approach music from a graph-theoretical perspective is followed by a list of music-related and other RDF vocabularies that may support this goal, such as MusicOWL, DoReMus, CIDOC CRMinf, or the NIE-INE ontologies. Using the example of some of Webern's sketches for two drafted Goethe settings (M306 & M307), a preliminary graph-based model for philological knowledge and processes is envisioned, which incorporates existing ontologies from the context of cultural heritage and music. Finally, possible use-cases, and the consequences of such an approach to scholarly music editions, are discussed

A model for annotating musical versions and arrangements across multiple documents and media

We present a model for the annotation of musical works, where the annotations are created with respect to a conceptual abstraction of the music instead of directly to concrete encodings. This supports musicologists in constructing arguments about musical elements that occur in multiple digital library sources (or other web resources), that recur across a work, or that appear in different forms in different arrangements. It provides a way of discussing musical content without tying that discourse to the location, notation or medium of the content, allowing evidence from multiple libraries and in different formats to be brought together to support musicological assertions. This model is implemented in Linked Data and illustrated in a prototype application in which musicologists annotate vocal arrangements of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony from multiple sources