Purcell Plus: Exploring an eScience Methodology for Musicologists

在过去的二十年里，人们见证了对以数字形式存储的音乐的自动检索和分析工具的研究的巨大扩展，无论是以类似乐谱的表示形式还是作为音频文件。与此同时，作为音频文件的在线存储、呈现和下载的音乐出现了更惊人的爆炸性增长；通过下载的音乐销售正在迅速超过CD等传统媒体的销售。这给音乐学学科既带来了机遇，也带来了挑战，因为虽然分布式数字资源提供了两个前景，即音乐素材范围的巨大扩大和现成的语料库，以供基于内容的方法进行研究(从而一举击败了音乐学是一门数据匮乏的学科的反对意见)，例如，到目前为止，由ISIR会议代表的领域的研究人员开发的工具通常既不打算也不真正适合那些不是技术专家的人使用。(出于同样的原因，这些研究中的大部分实际上对音乐的了解程度低于满足专业用户需求所需的程度。)随着EPSRC最近为面向eScience的大规模音乐信息检索(MIR)项目OMRAS 2(Goldsmiths And Queen Mary)提供资金，该项目包含了主要的面向用户的研究，学术界将获得更多音乐家友好的工具。然而，到目前为止，很少或根本没有考虑到在新语料库上使用这些工具进行音乐学研究的实际方法；更不用说这种工作可能对该学科的传统价值观和方法产生的影响。Purcell Plus通过在一个新颖的软件框架中使用这些工具来解决这个问题，该软件框架提供了一种从音乐来源材料本身获取音乐知识的方法；然后可以对照传统方法的结果进行评估。原始材料的三个基本领域(编码乐谱、音频表演和文本评论)可以提供丰富的相关标签、能指、陈述和手势的上下文。他们在不同媒体中的位置在框架中是联系在一起的，例如，表演者对乐谱的某些特征做出反应的方式，或者，也许，他们的表演是否支持其他人在口头评论中的陈述。本研究选择的音乐来源是珀塞尔的签名《幻想曲》和《器乐合奏名录》(C1680，大英图书馆)，这是公认的英格兰最伟大作曲家的全部作品中的早期杰作。该收藏有几张CD，以及几个版本。收藏的完整编码将在MeTAMuSE项目(Goldsmiths)内完成；我们还将委托专家根据最近的一篇博士论文(由艾伦·霍华德，KCL)进行专家评论。Purcell的材料将进入新的框架，并将被一名博士生用作更深入的音乐学方法论研究的测试材料。Purcell Plus开发了一种协调的方法来服务于音乐学学科，因为它采用了从MIR等科学领域涌现的新技术，而不会威胁到传统学术话语的独特和有用的方面。我们不建议建立一个全面的音乐学方法论、知识或话语理论，甚至也不建议建立一个全面运作的系统来进行一般的音乐知识启发。其目的是促进新技术的使用，尤其是在支持和加强音乐学论证方面，同时在计算机方法可以处理的音乐的数量和这种方法提供的证据的新的量化评估模式方面开辟新的视野。该项目将为今后的实地工作奠定基础。

The last two decades have witnessed an enormous expansion of research into tools for the automated retrieval and analysis of music stored digitally, either in score-like representations or as audio files. This is paralleled by the even more breathtaking explosion in online storage, presentation and downloading of music as audio files; sales of music by download are rapidly outstripping those by conventional media such as CDs. This presents both opportunities and challenges for the discipline of musicology, for while distributed digital resources hold out the twin prospects of a vast expansion of the range of musical source material and ready-made corpora for investigation by content-based methods (thus defeating at a stroke the objection that musicology is perforce a data-poor discipline), the tools that have so far been developed by researchers in the fields represented by the ISMIR conference, for example, are generally neither intended nor really suitable for use by those who are not technological experts. (By the same token, much of that research is in fact less musically-informed than it needs to be to satisfy the demands of the professional user.) With the recent funding by the EPSRC of the large-scale and eScience orientated music information retrieval (MIR) project, OMRAS 2 (Goldsmiths and Queen Mary), which contains a major strand of user-orientated research, more musician-friendly tools will become available to the academic community. Yet little or no consideration has hitherto been given to the actual methodology of musicological research using these tools on the new corpora; still less on the impact such work might have on the traditional values and methods of the discipline. Purcell Plus addresses this issue by using these tools in a novel software framework which offers a means of eliciting musical knowledge from the musical source material itself; this can then be assessed against the findings of traditional methods. Three basic domains of source material (encoded scores, audio performances and textual commentaries) can provide a rich context of associated labels, signifiers, statements and gestures. Their locations within the various media are linked in the framework, and conclusions might be drawn about, for example, the way in which performers respond to certain features of the scores, or, perhaps, whether their performances support statements made by others in the verbal commentaries.The musical source that has been chosen for this study is Purcell's autograph MS of Fantazies and In Nomines for instrumental ensemble (c1680, British Library), which is recognised as an early masterpiece in the oeuvre of England's greatest composer. There are several CDs of the collection, as well as several editions. A complete encoding of the collection will be done within the MeTAMuSE project (Goldsmiths); we shall also commission an expert commentary based on a recent PhD thesis (by Alan Howard, KCL). The Purcell materials will be entered into the new framework, and will be used by a PhD student as the test material in a deeper study of musicological methodology.Purcell Plus develops a coordinated approach to serve the discipline of musicology as it adopts the new technologies emerging from the 'scientific' fields such as MIR, without threatening the distinctive and useful aspects of traditional scholarly discourse. We do not propose to build a comprehensive theory of musicological methodology, knowledge or discourse, nor even a fully-working system to undertake musical knowledge-elicitation in general. The aim is to promote the use of the new technology in an enabling role, above all in supporting and strengthening musicological argument while opening up new horizons both in terms of the quantity of music that can be dealt with by computer-based methods and of the new quantitative modes of evaluation of evidence that such methods offer. This project will lay the foundations for future work in the field.