Historicized Composition and Creative Ethnomusicology

This paper investigates relationship between compositional and ethnomusicological research. The method of historicized composition developed out of my work as a chant scholar, as ongoing ethnomusicological research has had a profound influence on my compositional work. Understanding and underscoring historical and phenomenological relationships between music and language, the act of composition becomes a creative discovery of relationships between musical material and music history

Zoom arrière. L’ethnomusicologie à l’ère du Big Data

Les techniques d’extraction automatique d’information musicale appliquées à des répertoires de musiques traditionnelles ont ouvert de nouvelles perspectives dans le champ de l’ethnomusicologie. Si les chercheurs anglophones ont adopté le terme computational ethnomusicology pour désigner cette branche spécifique de l’ethnomusicologie, une même segmentation disciplinaire n’a pas eu lieu en France où ce nouveau champ de la recherche s’inscrit plus globalement dans le domaine des humanités numériques. Cet article collectif se propose de faire un état des lieux de la recherche dans ce domaine émergent. Nous nous interrogerons sur le devenir de l’ethnomusicologie dans ce contexte de « révolution numérique » où les dispositifs informatiques bouleversent d’ores et déjà les pratiques de recherche

Computational analysis of world music corpora

PhDThe comparison of world music cultures has been considered in musicological research since the end of the 19th century. Traditional methods from the field of comparative musicology typically involve the process of manual music annotation. While this provides expert knowledge, the manual input is timeconsuming and limits the potential for large-scale research. This thesis considers computational methods for the analysis and comparison of world music cultures. In particular, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) tools are developed for processing sound recordings, and data mining methods are considered to study similarity relationships in world music corpora. MIR tools have been widely used for the study of (mainly) Western music. The first part of this thesis focuses on assessing the suitability of audio descriptors for the study of similarity in world music corpora. An evaluation strategy is designed to capture challenges in the automatic processing of world music recordings and different state-of-the-art descriptors are assessed. Following this evaluation, three approaches to audio feature extraction are considered, each addressing a different research question. First, a study of singing style similarity is presented. Singing is one of the most common forms of musical expression and it has played an important role in the oral transmission of world music. Hand-designed pitch descriptors are used to model aspects of the singing voice and clustering methods reveal singing style similarities in world music. Second, a study on music dissimilarity is performed. While musical exchange is evident in the history of world music it might be possible that some music cultures have resisted external musical influence. Low-level audio features are combined with machine learning methods to find music examples that stand out in a world music corpus, and geographical patterns are examined. The last study models music similarity using descriptors learned automatically with deep neural networks. It focuses on identifying music examples that appear to be similar in their audio content but share no (obvious) geographical or cultural links in their metadata. Unexpected similarities modelled in this way uncover possible hidden links between world music cultures. This research investigates whether automatic computational analysis can uncover meaningful similarities between recordings of world music. Applications derive musicological insights from one of the largest world music corpora studied so far. Computational analysis as proposed in this thesis advances the state-of-the-art in the study of world music and expands the knowledge and understanding of musical exchange in the world.Queen Mary Principal’s research studentship

Engineering systematic musicology : methods and services for computational and empirical music research

One of the main research questions of *systematic musicology* is concerned with how people make sense of their musical environment. It is concerned with signification and meaning-formation and relates musical structures to effects of music. These fundamental aspects can be approached from many different directions. One could take a cultural perspective where music is considered a phenomenon of human expression, firmly embedded in tradition. Another approach would be a cognitive perspective, where music is considered as an acoustical signal of which perception involves categorizations linked to representations and learning. A performance perspective where music is the outcome of human interaction is also an equally valid view. To understand a phenomenon combining multiple perspectives often makes sense. The methods employed within each of these approaches turn questions into concrete musicological research projects. It is safe to say that today many of these methods draw upon digital data and tools. Some of those general methods are feature extraction from audio and movement signals, machine learning, classification and statistics. However, the problem is that, very often, the *empirical and computational methods require technical solutions* beyond the skills of researchers that typically have a humanities background. At that point, these researchers need access to specialized technical knowledge to advance their research. My PhD-work should be seen within the context of that tradition. In many respects I adopt a problem-solving attitude to problems that are posed by research in systematic musicology. This work *explores solutions that are relevant for systematic musicology*. It does this by engineering solutions for measurement problems in empirical research and developing research software which facilitates computational research. These solutions are placed in an engineering-humanities plane. The first axis of the plane contrasts *services* with *methods*. Methods *in* systematic musicology propose ways to generate new insights in music related phenomena or contribute to how research can be done. Services *for* systematic musicology, on the other hand, support or automate research tasks which allow to change the scope of research. A shift in scope allows researchers to cope with larger data sets which offers a broader view on the phenomenon. The second axis indicates how important Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques are in a solution. MIR-techniques are contrasted with various techniques to support empirical research. My research resulted in a total of thirteen solutions which are placed in this plane. The description of seven of these are bundled in this dissertation. Three fall into the methods category and four in the services category. For example Tarsos presents a method to compare performance practice with theoretical scales on a large scale. SyncSink is an example of a service

Un algoritmo para la detección automática de falsetas de guitarra flamenca

La terminología acuñada en el ámbito de la guitarra flamenca es pobre y en ocasiones algo ambigua, lo que genera gran controversia al estudiarla o interactuar con otros músicos. Así, términos como falseta, melodía o variación melódica, se aplican de forma indiscriminada. Con el fin de arrojar información adicional y facilitar un estudio más explícito y objetivo, se plantea un algoritmo de extracción automática de aquellas secciones de audio en que sólo intervenga la guitarra ejecutando una falseta. Así, este proyecto tiene como objetivo fundamental la identificación automática de falsetas flamencas, entendiendo éstas como determinados fragmentos musicales interpretados por la guitarra flamenca que poseen entidad musical propia y se ejecuta entre dos interpretaciones vocales. La investigación ha sido realizada a partir de la colección de una serie de grabaciones en las que intervienen la guitarra, la voz del cantaor e incluso, en algunos casos, la percusión.The terminology associated to the field of the flamenco guitar is ocassionally poor and ambiguous, so it generates controversy by studying it or by playing and interacting with other musicians. Thereby, concepts like falseta, melody or melodic variation, are applied with no discrimination. With the final purpose of giving aditional information and making easier a more objective and explicit study, it is proposed an algorithm for an automatic extraction of all the audio sections where exclusively the guitar takes part. This Project has as main objective the automatic identification of flamenco falsetas, understanding them as the musical fragments played by the flamenco guitar, with their own musical entities, and executed between two vocal interpretations. The research has been done starting from a collection of audios containing the guitar, the voice and, ocassionally, some percussion.Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Ingeniería de las Tecnologías de Telecomunicació

The theoretical, methodological and technical issues of digital folklore databases and computational folkloristics

The study examines the problems and possibilities presented by the digitization of national folklore archives and collections in the wider context of folklore archiving and digital humanities. The primary goal of the study is to present a problem-oriented and critical overview of the available digital databases containing folklore texts (WossiDiA, Sagragrunnur, ETKSpace, Danish Folklore Nexus, Nederlandse VolksverhalenBank, The Schools’ Collection, etc.), and of the analyses conducted on these using computational methods. The paper first presents a historical overview of the conceptualization that went into the creation of folklore databases (genre-centered, collector, and collection-centered approaches), followed by a discussion of the practical, technical, and theoretical aspects of digital content creation (crowdsourcing, markup languages, TEI, digital critical editions, etc.). The study then takes a look at the new digital tools and methods applied in the analysis of digitized folklore texts (text-mining, network theory methods, data visualization), and finally places databases and computational folkloristics within a larger theoretical framework

Pursuing Taiwanese-ness: the contemporary music practices of Taitung indigenous people

This research is an ethnography exploring the contemporary music practices of the indigenous people of Taitung, a southeastern county in Taiwan. Indigenous people make up a large proportion of the population of Taitung, and their music has in recent years been used in international and local events to potray a unique Taiwanese identity. I discuss how indigenous and other Taiwanese have collaborated to create this identity - the Taiwanese-ness - and how they have done so with tangled webs of concerns for authenticity, hybridisation and Otherness. I examine two opposite approaches in heredity and maintenance of the tradition: first, sticking to locality, and therefore passing down the tradition in a functional way; second, endorsing and appropriating transnational pop practices in order to garner commercial success. I argue that living experience - the familiarity to a musical culture which Mantle Hood (1982) considered the way that enabled ethnic groups to understand and evaluate their own musical traditions - is essential and irreplaceable. Hence, affiliation to a homeland, as depicted through notions of mountain and sea, becomes a key element in the self-identity of musicians as 'indigenous' (yuanzhumin in Mandarin, meaning 'original inhabitants'), and that the homeland, as the place of ancestors, allows indigenous groups to safeguard their traditions. However, indigenous Taiwanese are comfortable with and uphold a shared culture that was brought to the island by Han migrants, and this is evident in the influences of trans-cultural commercial and global Mandopop. Musicians tend to apply elements of their traditions such as indigenous languages, pentatonicism, ancient songs, specific rhythms and the incorporation of non-lexical vocables, wherever they can, using a bricolage approach. At the same time, musicians enrich the music culture, keeping tradition alive by adding to it in reciprocal ways elements from the outside, but also introducing the po­tential for cultural 'grey-out' as elements of traditional music are altered. Keywords: Taitung, indigenous people, music practices, mountain and sea, Taiwanese-ness

Desarrollo e implementación de algoritmos para escalado de melodías flamencas

El estudio de las medidas de la similitud melódica es de vital importancia en los sistema de recuperación de información musical. En este proyecto usamos técnicas de concordancia geométrica para medir la similitud entre dos melodías. Proponemos un algoritmo eficiente para un problema de optimización inspirado en la operación melódica del escalado lineal. En el problema de escalado, una melodía de consulta es escalada hacia adelante hasta que la similitud melódica entre la consulta y la referencia sea mínima. La métrica de similitud melódica utilizada es el área comprendida entre dos contornos melódicos.Melodic similarity is of key importance in Music Information Retrieval. In this project, we use geometric matching techniques to measure the similarity between two melodies. We propose an efficient algorithm for an optimization problem inspired in the operation of linear scaling on melodies. In the scaling problem, an incoming query melody is scaled forward until the similarity measure between the query and the reference melody is minimized. The similarity measure used is the area between two melodic contours.Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Ingeniería de Tecnologías Industriale

A Computational Approach to the Detection and Prediction of (Ir)Regularity in Children's Folk Songs

We examine (ir)regularity in the musical structure of 736 monophonic children's folk songs from 22 European countries, by simulating and detecting (ir)regularity with the computational model, IDyOM, and our own algorithm, Ir_Reg, which classifies melodies according to regularity of their musical structure. IDyOM offers a range of viewpoints which allow observation and prediction of various musical features. We used five viewpoints to measure the information content and entropy of musical events in songs. Analysis across the data shows absence of irregular musical structure in children's folk songs from Croatia, Serbia, Turkey, Portugal, Hungary, and Romania. Conversely, absence of regular structure in children's folk songs was found in Great Britain, Norway and Switzerland. Further analysis of (ir)regularity, by individual country, revealed the importance of patterns repeated at pitch in regular songs, and a higher occurrence of transposed repeated patterns in irregular songs. Principal component analysis (PCA) shows the salience of pitch and pitch intervals in the perception of (ir)regular structure. Neither rhythm nor contour affects the perception of regularity. Recurring pulse/meter and arch-like melodic structure were found in the majority of children's folk songs. The study shows that irregularity exists in children's folk songs, and that this genre can be complex

Non-Isochronous Meter: A Study of Cross cultural practice, analytic technique, and implications for jazz pedagogy

This dissertation examines the use of non-isochronous (NI) meters in jazz compositional and performative practices (meters as comprised of cycles of a prime number [e.g., 5, 7, 11] or uneven divisions of non-prime cycles [e.g., 9 divided as 2+2+2+3]). The explorative meter practices of jazz, while constituting a central role in the construction of its own identity, remains curiously absent from jazz scholarship. The conjunct research broadly examines NI meters and the various processes/strategies and systems utilized in historical and current jazz composition and performance practices. While a considerable amount of NI meter composers have advertantly drawn from the metric practices of non-Western music traditions, the potential for utilizing insights gleaned from contemporary music-theoretical discussions of meter have yet to fully emerge as a complimentary and/or organizational schemata within jazz pedagogy and discourse. This paper seeks to address this divide, but not before an accurate picture of historical meter practice is assessed, largely as a means for contextualizing developments within historical and contemporary practice and discourse. The dissertation presents a chronology of explorative meter developments in jazz, firstly, by tracing compositional output, and secondly, by establishing the relevant sources within conjunct periods of development i.e., scholarly works, relative academic developments, and tractable world music sources. Bridging the gap between world music meter sources and theoretical musicology (primarily, the underlying perceptual and cognitive model which represents a topology of the structural premises of meter) the research acts to direct and inform a compositional process which directly accounts for an isomorphic link between structurally similar meters