Digital Musicology
“Applied computational and informatics methods for enhancing musicology”
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Convenor: Dr Kevin Page
Hashtag: #digitalmusicology and #DHOxSS
Computers: Participants are not required to bring their own laptops for this workshop. Laptop computers will be provided by DHOxSS
Abstract
A wealth of music and music-related information is now available digitally, offering tantalizing possibilities for digital musicologies. These resources include large collections of audio and scores, bibliographic and biographic data, and performance ephemera - not to mention the ‘hidden’ existence of these in other digital content. With such large and wide ranging opportunities come new challenges in methods, principally in adapting technological solutions to assist musicologists in identifying, studying, and disseminating scholarly insights from amongst this ‘data deluge’.
This workshop provides an introduction to computational and informatics methods that can be, and have been, successfully applied to musicology. Many of these techniques have their foundations in computer science, library and information science, mathematics and most recently Music Information Retrieval (MIR); sessions are delivered by expert practitioners from these fields and presented in the context of their collaborations with musicologists, and by musicologists relating their experiences of these multidisciplinary investigations.
The workshop comprises of a series of lectures and hands-on sessions, supplemented with reports from musicology research exemplars. Theoretical lectures are paired with practical sessions in which participants are guided through their own exploration of the topics and tools covered. Laptops will be loaned to participants with the appropriate specialised software installed and preconfigured.
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Convenor
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Dr Kevin Page is a senior researcher at the University of Oxford's e-Research Centre, where he studies the use of computational methods for organising and analysing music and musical information, and their application to Digital Musicology. He is PI of the AHRC ‘Unlocking Musicology’ project and a Co-I of ‘Digital Delius’ and ‘Mapping Manuscript Migrations’. He is co-founder and chair of the Digital Libraries for Musicology series, and an editor of the IJDL special issue on this topic. Dr Page led Semantic Web activity within the AHRC ‘Transforming Musicology’ large grant, when he established the Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.
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"Turning a piece of early music into computer code: a glorious ending to 5 days of #DigitalMusicology with @TMusicology"
Tweet, DHOxSS 2017 participant
The Digital Musicology workshop will be held in one of the Sloane Robinson seminar rooms.
Link to overview of the week's timetable including evening events.
Monday 2nd July
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08.15-09.30
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Registration (Sloane Robinson building)
Tea and coffee (ARCO building)
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09.30-10.30
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Opening Keynote (Sloane Robinson O'Reilly lecture theatre)
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10.30-11.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-12:30
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Welcome and housekeeping Kevin Page
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Overview of Digital Muscology Kevin Page
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Roundtable introduction from attendees Kevin Page
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​Digital Musicology: a personal perspective David Lewis
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An Introduction to Music Information Retrieval Stephen Downie
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12.30-14.00
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:00-16:00
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Using computers to analyse recordings Stephen Downie, Chris Cannam, Kevin Page
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Hands-on exercises Chris Cannam, David Weigl, David Lewis, Stephen Downie
16.00-16.30
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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16:30-17:30
Hands-on: Using computer analyses to index and find recordings (continued) Chris Cannam, David Weigl, David Lewis, Stephen Downie
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Using computer analyses to index and find recordings (AudioDB) David Lewis
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Tuesday 3rd July
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09:00-10:30
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Historical musicology and digital cataloguing: achievements and possibilities Joanna Bullivant
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Authorial Fingerprinting for Renaissance Polyphony: Finding Contrapuntal Formulas in Two Corpora of French Chansons Catherine Motuz
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10.30-11.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-13:00
Training computers to automatically recognise patterns in recordings Stephen Downie, David Weigl, Kevin Page
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Hands-on exercises David Weigl, Stephen Downie, David Lewis
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13.00-14.30
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:30-15:30
Methods for analysing large-scale resources and big music data Tillman Weyde
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15.30-16.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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16.00-17.00
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Lectures (various venues)
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Wednesday 4th July
09:00-10:30
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Digitised Notated Music: hands on with MEI David Lewis, Andrew Hankinson
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10.30-11.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO Building)
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11:00-13:00
Digitised Notated Music: hands on with MEI (continued)
Annotating and structuring musicology knowledge using Linked Data Kevin Page
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13.00-14.30
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:30-15:30
Annotating and structuring musicology knowledge using Linked Data (continued)
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15.30-16.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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16.00-17.00
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Lectures (various venues)
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Thursday 5th July
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09:00-10:30
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Automatic transcription of scanned notation: state of the art and applications; hands on with Gamera Andrew Hankinson
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10.30-11.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-13:00
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Computer procesing of digital notated music: hands on with music 21 and programming in Python David Lewis, David Weigl
13.00-14.30
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:30-15:30
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Computer processing of digital notated music: hands on with music21 and programming in Python (continued) David Lewis, David Weigl
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15.30-16.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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16.00-17.00
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Lectures (various venues)
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Friday 6th July
09:00-10:30
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An overview of software and data management best practice David Weigl
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A case study in Early Music, from digitisation to musicological research Tim Crawford
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10.30-11.00
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Refreshment break (ARCO building)
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11:00-13:00
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Hands on: from digitisation to analysis, an end-to-end example David Lewis, Andrew Hankinson, Kevin Page, David Weigl
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13.00-14.00
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Lunch (Dining Hall)
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14:00-15:00
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Round table discussion: applied digital musicology in your research Kevin Page, Tim Crawford, David Lewis, Andrew Hankinson, David Weigl, Stephen Downie
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15:00-16:00
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Closing plenary (Sloane Robinson O'Reilly lecture theatre)
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Speaker Biographies
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Joanna Bullivant (University of Oxford) is a musicologist educated at the University of Oxford, who specialises in early twentieth-century British music, musical modernism, and music and politics. She has a growing interest in digital musicology through her work creating a digital catalogue for the AHRC project ‘Delius, Modernism, and the Sound of Place’. As part of a research team encompassing scholars at the Oxford E-Research Centre and the Oxford Faculty of Music and the British Library, she is currently working on a new Delius project, creating a pioneering interactive digital exhibition on the composer for the British Library, and running a range of educational events for 16-21 year olds.
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Chris Cannam is Principal Research Software Developer in the Centre for Digital Music at Queen Mary University of London, where he works with researchers to produce useful software for music analysis. He is the primary author of the Sonic Visualiser application and many of its plugins.
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Tim Crawford worked as a professional lutenist, playing on several recordings made during the 1980s. As a musicologist he studies lute music of the 16th to 18th centuries. Since the early 1990s he has been active in the rapidly-expanding field of MIR and was President of ISMIR for two years. He was PI of the AHRC-funded Transforming Musicology project, which was the immediate catalyst for the Digital Musicology workshops in DHOxSS.
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J. Stephen Downie is a professor and the associate dean for research at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois. Dr. Downie conducts research in music information retrieval. He was instrumental in founding both the International Society for Music Information Retrieval and the Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange. Downie is also the Illinois co-director of the HathiTrust Research Center which provides analytic access to the HathiTrust's
massive collections of digitized texts.
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Andrew Hankinson is a Senior Software Engineer with the Bodleian Libraries in the Digital Research area. He earned a Masters in Library and Information Studies and a PhD in Music Information Retrieval from McGill University. Andrew specializes in working with large collections of digitized music documents, opening access to these collections by
using document image recognition technologies to make them searchable. He is also a member of the board of the Music Encoding Initiative, and a collaborator on the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project.
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David Lewis is a researcher based at the Oxford e-Research Centre and the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He has recently worked on projects at Goldsmiths, University of London, Universität des Saarlandes and Universiteit Utrecht. His research focusses on the creation, dissemination and use of digital corpora of music (such as the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music) and music theory (earlymusictheory.org and Thesaurus Musicarum Italicarum).
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Catherine Motuz enjoys an active career in North America and Europe as a performer, teacher, and scholar. Co-director of Ensemble La Rose des Vents in Montreal and a founding member of I Fedeli, she has played and recorded with ensembles including Concerto Palatino, the Amsterdam and Freiburg Baroque Orchestras, the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal and the Academy of Ancient Music. She is currently professor of historical trombone at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and has taught at McGill University and the University of Montreal. Catherine lived in Basel, Switzerland, from 2004 to 2011, where she studied historical trombone with Charles Toet at the Schola Cantorum. Now a Ph.D. Candidate in musicology at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, her dissertation focuses on ideas about musical expression in the early Renaissance. She is active in the field of improvisation, researching historical teaching methods and giving workshops on improvised counterpoint in Europe and Canada. She has also been active on the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project at McGill University, investigating the use of computational musicology in understanding musical style.
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David M. Weigl is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre. His work involves the application of Linked Data and semantic technologies in order to enrich digital music information and facilitate access to a variety of musical data sources. His research interests revolve around music perception and cognition, and music information retrieval.
