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blog: eScience for Musicology workshop - some highlights
-This text is extracted from an email I sent on the CCH internal mailing list.-
I attended the eScience for Musicology workshop at the e-Science
institute in Edinburgh on the 1st and 2nd of July 2009. http://www.nesc.ac.uk/esi/events/996/
The workshop aimed at investigating the relevance of e-Science methodologies in musicology. The organizer Richard Lewis defined e-Science as "using technology to enhance existing research methods and enable new research methods".
The papers presented in the workshop covered a wide range of activities in the field of computational musicology. However all of them tried to stress the need to improve collaboration between traditional
musicologists and computational musicologists, individuating in particular two phases when the mutual exchange is necessary: the definition of research questions and objectives and the presentation of
the results in a useful and understandable manner for the musicologicalaudience.
For more information refer to Lewis' presentation:
http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/download.cfm?index=4177
Of the papers presented, I think the following might be of interest for some of us at CCH.
David Bretherton: musicSpace: Improving Access to Musicology's Data
Sources.
slides: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/download.cfm?index=4171
This paper presented a multi-faceted browsing interface that is being developed at the University of Southampton. It seeks to join together in one searchable and interactive space many selected musicological
resources online (i.e. Naxos music library, British Library Sound Archive, the Oxford Grove Dictionary of Music, etc.). MusicSpace collected and enhanced the (sometimes meaningless) metadata of this websites through authority lists ('gazetteers') and through increasing granularity.
http://www.mspace.fm/projects/musicspace/
Frans Wiering: Musical Meaning and Music Information Retrieval.
slides: http://www.nesc.ac.uk/action/esi/download.cfm?index=4175
This talk reflects on what are the aspects that are relevant to retrieve from a multi-modal musical object.
When Wiering discussed query-by-example as a technique for retrieving music notation, he showed the Dutch Song Database project http://www.liederenbank.nl/index.php?lan=en which includes:
- the lyrics of the songs, which are searchable also by rhyme scheme, accents and rhyme gender;
- the digital version of some of the sources, with a non-flash image viewer
- the recording of a performance of some of the sources
- the score of some of the sources (searchable in future with query-by-example)
Yves Raimond: Publishing and interlinking music-related data on the web.
Raimond presented his rdf-based ontology for describing music-related data. http://musicontology.com/
Ichiro Fujinaga: Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Research Project
This talk presented a series of projects ongoing at McGill university in Canada. DDMAL seeks to define methodologies to digitise music documents scattered around the world.
http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~ich/research/DDMAL/
Gamera is a Optical Music Recognition software for mensural notation that will be part of the digitisation process. The preservation will be focused on the symbolic domain first, and later on the digitization of manuscript images.
http://coltrane.music.mcgill.ca/mapp/gamera.html
MAPP it the audio preservation side of the project. The project is now focussing on 78RMPs. The surfaces of the discs are being scanned and transformed into sound. Post-processing techniques will reveal the sound hidden by the noise caused by scratches and old grooves. The preservation is focussed on the physical object more than on "how this piece should sound".
http://coltrane.music.mcgill.ca/mapp/
Follow the online discussion from the workshop - and make a contribution - on the event page: http://www.arts-humanities.net/event/e_science_musicology
