Dig that Lick. Analysing large-scale data for melodic patterns in jazz performances

爵士乐演奏的录音遗产现在跨越了一个世纪，为探索和分析提供了关于即兴创作的知识宝库。由于音频内容的计算分析(包括音乐信息检索)和信息管理技术(包括大数据和语义网技术)领域的重大进步，现在可以彻底说明这些实践和爵士乐的表演过程。前者允许在高级音乐方面自动描述音频记录，而后者允许将这种分析链接到描述表演者、作曲家和编曲者的书目元数据以及描述听众和音乐表演和消费的背景的历史和社会元数据。这些技术现在正达到这样一个水平，即自动语义元数据提取和聚合技术可以以前所未有的方式促进对大型集合的访问，从而培养新的跨学科研究机会。在音乐学家和计算机科学家的密切合作下，我们将开发方法来更深入和更全面地理解爵士乐及其与社会和文化背景的演变。该项目侧重于爵士乐即兴创作中旋律模式的发展和历史。作为一项有目的的努力，我们将完成从原始媒体数据(音频记录)到对模式的传输和转换的理解的整个方法周期，这将是美学背景和历史背景下的。该项目汇集了大西洋两岸的知名学者和几个备受瞩目的项目的成果，以组装技术基础设施，创建工具，进行技术分析，并为该领域和更广泛的文化研究开发人文和社会科学方法。该项目寻求通过以下方式扩展爵士乐研究的研究范式：-优化现有基础设施，以便在大型集合上部署语义音频分析；-调查最先进的语义网技术在信息管理方面的好处和障碍；-通过创建易于使用的界面进行内容选择、语义分析和聚合，促进对大型音频和相关元数据集合的访问；-使用开发的基础设施来分析大型爵士乐语料库中旋律模式的使用情况；以及-将分析结果与元数据和背景知识表示相关联，以便追踪和解释跨越时间和空间以及各种历史和社会背景的音乐影响。

The recorded legacy of jazz performance now spans a century and offers a trove of knowledge about improvisation for exploration and analysis. A thorough account of these practices involved and processes in which jazz is performed is now possible thanks to significant advances in the fields of computational analysis of audio content (including Music Information Retrieval) and information management technologies (including Big Data and Semantic Web technologies). The former enables the automatic description of audio recordings in terms of high-level musical aspects, and the latter allows such analyses to be linked to bibliographic metadata describing performers, composers, and arrangers as well as historical and social metadata describing listeners and contexts of music performance and consumption. These technologies are now reaching a level where automatic semantic metadata extraction and aggregation technologies can facilitate access to large collections in an unprecedented way, fostering new interdisciplinary research opportunities. In a close collaboration between musicologists and computer scientists we will develop the methods to create a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of jazz music and its evolution in relation to the social and cultural context.The project focuses on the development and history of melodic patterns (or "licks") in jazz improvisations. As a purposeful effort, we will complete the full cycle of methods from raw media data (audio recordings) to an understanding of the transmission and transformation of patterns, which will be aesthetically contextualised and historically situated. The project brings together renowned scholars and results from several high-profile projects on both sides of the Atlantic to assemble the technical infrastructure, create the tools, conduct the technical analysis and develop the humanistic and social scientific methods for this domain and cultural studies more generally.The project seeks to extend the research paradigms of jazz studies by:- optimising existing infrastructures for the deployment of semantic audio analyses over large collections;- investigating the benefits and barriers of state-of-the art Semantic Web technologies for information management;- facilitating access to large collections of audio and associated metadata by creating easy to use interfaces for content selection, semantic analysis, and aggregation of;- using the developed infrastructure to analyse the use of melodic patterns in a large jazz corpus; and- relating the analytic results to metadata and background knowledge representations in order to trace and interpret musical influence across time and space as well as various historical and social context.