Transforming Musicology

该项目由伦敦大学金史密斯学院计算机系的Tim Crawford教授领导，汇集了15名研究人员，以实现音乐学学科的数字化转型。这是一个机会，通过认识到其多学科性质的全部含义，并利用技术的潜力来研究互联网上巨大的音乐资源，从而改变该学科的影响和地位。数字革命已经改变了音乐世界。同样的技术，为广大的和不断增长的国际听众提供了前所未有的音乐渠道，也可以向世界开放音乐学——任何人和每个人都可以通过技术支持的各种方式做出贡献。我们将展示如何增强音乐信息检索（MIR）的计算工具，并使其适应音乐学家的需求，以及如何利用语义网的最新发展，使他们的工作更相关，更可持续，以便他们的方法可以很容易地在新数据上重复使用。这个项目将通过多学科协作来激发创造力。过去，音乐学家往往是孤独的学者；在未来，多学科研究环境下的定期合作对于他们在潜在的海量音乐收藏中发现什么是“有趣的”将是至关重要的。我们将在三个主要研究领域使用MIR工具。其中两个是音乐学的典型主题，将由世界一流的专家进行：16世纪的音乐和瓦格纳的主题。这些将使用最先进的乐谱和音频分析技术来扩展音乐学研究的范围，超出了通常对印刷乐谱的限制。我们还将在金史密斯学院做心理学工作，研究为什么动机如此容易识别（或不容易识别）。我们的第三个主要研究方向是完全新颖的，不亚于一个新的“社交媒体音乐学”的原型。现在，音乐的创作、录制、分发、再利用和分享都是完全在线的，我们将探索一种全新的研究方式，以及音乐思想的在线传播。我们还会让一群音乐学家和技术专家一起工作六个月，研究他们自己的研究想法，帮助他们实现这些想法。这项工作的成果将在一个公开研讨会上展示，并在网上和以书的形式出版。这些小型项目将在网络/沙坑会议上启动，并将在网上记录和展示。该网站和博客将用于研究人员、研究团体和音乐行业之间动态和持续的接触。通过这个项目，音乐行业的技术人员将看到音乐学通过提供更好的途径来获取他们想听的音乐，从而帮助他们满足客户的需求。音乐传播和重复使用的数字革命引发了许多与创造力、作者身份、营销、版权和商业价值有关的关键问题，而这些问题通常与音乐学有关。结合音乐学的分析方法和数字方法的力量，为这些辩论带来了知识的严谨性和经验的有效性。音乐学家需要这种跨学科的背景，以最有效地贡献，并在音乐产业中创造新的和有价值的角色。音乐学不应该是一门“象牙塔”学科；大多数人感兴趣的是音乐从何而来，它是如何构思和制作的，它如何影响我们和社会。音乐存在于人们的思想中，音乐的研究本质上是关于人与人之间的互动。正因为如此，音乐带来了哲学、心理和智力上的复杂挑战；因此，它是一个特别富有成效的领域，可以解决技术挑战，这将更广泛地适用于数字人文学科和其他领域。

This project, led by Prof Tim Crawford in the Computing Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London, brings together 15 researchers to effect a Digital Transformation of the discipline of musicology. It is an opportunity to transform the discipline's impact and status by recognising the full implications of its multidisciplinary nature and taking advantage of the potentials of technology for studying the vast musical resources of the internet. The world of music has been already transformed by the digital revolution. The same technology that has given unprecedented access to music for a vast and ever-growing international audience can open musicology up to the world - anyone and everyone can contribute by a variety of means enabled by that technology. We will show how the computational tools of music information retrieval (MIR) can be enhanced and adapted to the needs of musicologists, and how state-of-the-art developments in the Semantic Web can be exploited both to make their work more relevant and more sustainable, so that their methods can be easily re-used on new data.This project will stimulate creativity through multidisciplinary collaborative working. In the past, musicologists have tended to be lone scholars; regular collaboration in a multidisciplinary research environment will in future be essential for them to find what is "interesting" in potentially huge collections of music.We shall be using MIR tools in three main strands of research. Two of these are typical subjects for musicology and will be conducted by world-leading experts: 16th-century music and Wagnerian leitmotives. These will use state-of-the-art score- and audio-analysis techniques to extend the range of musicological investigation beyond the normal limitation to printed scores. We'll also be doing psychological work at Goldsmiths to study why leitmotives are so recognisable (or not). Our third main research strand is entirely novel, being nothing less than a prototype for a new 'musicology of the social media'. Music is now created, recorded, distributed, re-used and shared entirely online throughout the world and we will explore a whole new way of studying it and the online spread of musical ideas.We'll also get a group of musicologists to work for six months on their own research ideas alongside technologists who'll help to realise them. The fruits of this work will be presented at a public workshop and published online and in book form. These mini-projects will be launched at a networking/sandpit meeting which will be recorded and presented online. The website and blog will be used for dynamic and ongoing engagement between the researchers, the research community, and the music industry.Through this project technologists in the music industry will see that musicology helps them answer the needs of their clients by offering better means of access to the music they want to hear. The digital revolution in music delivery and re-use raises many crucial issues to do with creativity, authorship, marketing, copyright and commercial value beyond those normally associated with musicology. Combining the analytical methods of musicology and the power of digital methods brings intellectual rigour and empirical validity to these debates. Musicologists need this cross-disciplinary background to contribute most effectively and to create new and valuable roles within the music industry.Musicology should not be an 'ivory-tower' discipline; most people are interested in where music comes from, how it is conceived and made, how it affects us and society. Music goes on in people's minds, and the study of music is essentially about interactions between people. Because of this, music raises a complex mixture of philosophical, psychological and intellectual challenges; so it is a particularly fruitful domain for working through technical challenges which will be more widely applicable to the Digital Humanities and beyond.