New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies: Music Information Retrieval and AI Support for Jazz Scholarship in Digital Archives

音乐研究已经发展出了广泛的方法，其中系统音乐学、民族音乐学或音乐心理学已经发展成为“面向数据的实证研究”，这得益于计算方法。特别是在民族音乐学中，最近人们对计算音乐学及其在音频数据收集中的应用越来越感兴趣。同样，对西方音乐表现的实证研究，如时间、动态、音色及其与音乐结构的关系，也有着悠久的传统。然而，尽管最近取得了进展，但由于技术和法律的限制，这种类型的音乐研究迄今为止主要局限于相对较小的数据集。作为人文学科的音乐学和音乐史迄今为止从计算和数据处理方法中获得的好处有限，因为a)算法和技术需要太多的技术专长；b)研究对象（录音、乐谱、手稿和其他人工制品）虽然经常以数字化形式提供，但无法使用相关工具访问，例如分析算法、基于内容和上下文的智能搜索以及用户友好的系统和界面。本项目将改变这一限制，通过开发基于现有算法（由项目合作伙伴在以前的研究中开发）的新方法和工具，并将这些工具应用于爵士乐研究，探索爵士乐研究的新方向。档案中的数字材料将更容易获取，并在不同档案之间建立联系，录音将用最先进的算法进行分析，并与关联数据进行背景化，使用数字工具进行的研究将实现可共享。通过结合这些元素，可以开发新的方法并获得新的见解。我们将收集参与档案和从爵士乐研究社区的要求，以确保我们的工作符合在实践中应用于爵士乐的数字人文学科的需要和兴趣。根据要求，我们将整理数据集，确保数据和元数据的质量，然后对数据集进行预处理，从录音中提取符号信息。在现有算法和工具的基础上，我们将开发系统和界面，使音乐上有意义的搜索、分析和发现成为可能，超越标准的目录搜索。我们在这个项目中有几位知名的爵士乐学者，他们将使用我们开发的数据集和工具，在档案中不太知名的录音的“长尾”人文研究中开展案例研究。这些案例研究将举例说明爵士乐研究的新方向，即在本项目开发的工具的帮助下，将数据驱动的“远程阅读”与人类在“近距离阅读”方面的专业知识结合起来。在这项工作中解决的音乐问题将包括个人风格如何与特定的其他玩家以及美国主流爵士乐的总体趋势相关联。它还将包括对当地爵士传统的研究，特别是在苏格兰，以及对两个档案的比较研究，并举例说明连接不同大陆的数字档案的工具和方法。这些分析的结果将以高度互动的“丰富研究工作流程”（RRW）的形式提供。丰富的研究日志将包含研究查询，结果集，上下文信息，可视化和注释。RRW可以成为共享数字档案中研究工作知识的媒介，类似于在计算研究中日益流行的代码共享。所有结果将作为开放数据/开源软件提供。我们觉得这个项目有潜力将音乐学、图书馆、档案馆和计算机领域的社区聚集在一起，实现互利共赢。

Music research has developed a broad range of methods, where systematic musicology, ethnomusicology, or music psychology, have developed as "data oriented empirical research", which benefits from computing methods. In ethnomusicology particularly, there has been a recent growing interest in computational musicology and its application to audio data collections. Similarly, the empirical study of performance of Western music, such as timing, dynamics and timbre and their relation to musical structure has a long tradition. However, despite recent progress, this type of music research has so far been mostly limited to relatively small datasets, because of technological and legal limitations. Musicology and music history as a humanistic disciplines have so far had limited benefit from computational and dda methods, because a) the algorithms and technologies require too much technical expertise and b) the objects of study (recordings, scores, manuscripts and other artefacts), although often available in digitised form, cannot be accessed with the relevant tools, such as analysis algorithms, content and context based intelligent search, and user friendly systems and interfaces. This project will change this limitation and explore new directions in jazz research by developing novel methods and tools based on existing algorithms (developed by project partners in previous research) and applying these tools to jazz studies. Digital material in archives will be made more accessible and connected between different archives, audio recording will be analysed with state-of-the-art algorithms and contextualized with linked data, and research with digital tools will be made shareable. By combining these elements, novel methods can be developed and novel insights can be gained. We will collect requirements in participating archives and from the jazz research community to ensure that our work matches the needs and interests of digital humanities applied to jazz in practice. Based on the requirements, we will curate datasets, ensuring quality of the data and metadata, before pre-processing the datasets to extract symbolic information from audio recordings. Building on existing algorithms and tools, we will develop systems and interfaces that enable musically meaningful search, analysis and discovery, that goes beyond standard catalog search. We have several well-known jazz scholars in the project, who will use the datasets and tools we develop to develop case studies in humanistic research of the 'long tail' of lesser known recordings present in archives. These case studies will exemplify new directions in jazz studies that combine data-driven 'distant reading' with human expertise in 'close reading' with the help of the tool developed in this project . Musical questions addressed in this work will include how personal styles in relation to specific other players as well as to general trends in mainstream jazz in the US. It will also include the study of local jazz traditions, specifically in Scotland, and comparative studies overarching the two archives and exemplifying tools and methods for connecting digital archives that are on different continents.The results of these analyses will be made available in the form of highly interactive 'rich research workflows' (RRW). The rich research log will contain research queries, result sets, contextual information, visualisation and annotations. The RRW can be a medium for sharing working knowledge about research in digital archives similar to the increasingly popular sharing of code in computing research. All results will be made available as open data/open source software. We feel that this project has the potential to bring together communities from musicology, libraries and archives, and computing to mutual benefit.