Date/Time
Date(s) - 27 Feb 2015
2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Location
Butler Library, Columbia University
Category(ies) No Categories
Digital Projects in Music Research
Friday, February 27, 2-5 pm, 523 Butler Library
Presented by the Department of Music and the Columbia University Libraries
Bringing the Songs Home: Music Repatriation Projects at the Center for Ethnomusicology (Aaron Fox)
Aaron Fox will discuss the Center for Ethnomusicology’s ongoing projects to repatriate recordings of traditional and indigenous music (most from the 1930s and 1940s) to their source communities, and to return control over the publication of these archives, which includes the development of digital interfaces with these recordings and associated materials, including photographs and transcriptions, being developed in collaboration with indigenous elders, performers, educators, activists, and scholars. Discussion to include projects with Hopi, Inupiat, Tsimshian, and Navajo communities.
You can find out more about this project here, here, and here.
Using motion-capture technology to study musical experience (Mariusz Kozak)
Mariusz Kozak will present ways in which motion-capture technologies can be used to study how musicians, listeners, and dancers experience music through movement. The project relates to a broader interest in using digital technology to interpret how human artifacts are appropriated by end users, and to critically examine how this technology enables new humanistic methodologies. Questions of value of motion-capture technology, as well as its practical applications in music creation, analysis, criticism, and pedagogy, will also be discussed.
Read more here.
Marenzio Project (Giuseppe Gerbino, Mauro Calcagno, and Laurent Pugin)
Mauro Calcagno (University of Pennsylvania), Giuseppe Gerbino, and Laurent Pugin (Repertoire International des Sources Musicales, Switzerland) will present the digital edition of the secular music of Luca Marenzio (MODE), one of the most important composers of the European Renaissance. Under development by an international team of scholars from the US and Europe with the support of the Columbia Center for Digital Research and Scholarship and the Music Library, MODE introduces a new model for generating and disseminating modern editions of Western polyphony integrating musical philology and digital technology. New software applications for the optical recognition, superimposition, and collation of early music prints (Aruspix), and a new digital interface for the representation of music notation (Verovio) — developed by Pugin in conjunction with the Marenzio project — offer users a web-based dynamic environment for the study and performance of sixteenth-century secular polyphony.
The Computer Music Center and Music Technology at Columbia (Brad Garton)
CMC Director Brad Garton will present an overview of current and past work done at the CMC to support and enhance the Music Department’s technological work. Although historically rooted in music composition, the CMC is now supporting all parts of the Department (and other units in the University), with projects ranging from music analysis software to historical aspects of audio recording to music-modeling investigations to music interface development with colleagues at the Medical Center, the Computer Science Department and the Electrical Engineering Department at Columbia. The new Sound Arts MFA program (currently in its second year of existence) is bringing more creative talent to the CMC. The general philosophy behind the contemporary “CMC Mission” is to act as a resource (as much as possible) for music-technology activities at Columbia.
Read more here.
J-DISC – a tool for searching and exploring jazz recordings (Tad Shull)
Tad Shull (Center for Jazz Studies) will present J-DISC, a relational database that integrates rich information about jazz recording sessions, artist biographical information, compositions, and the production and dissemination of jazz recordings. J-DISC is designed to be collaborative, to an extent never possible in print or print-based online jazz discographies: it allows qualified scholars and researchers to edit and enhance the data, but also to share information about data that may be used and improved. Any Internet user may track artists and repertoire over time, uncover connections between musicians of contrasting backgrounds, and document the creative evolution of this important musical form using J-DISC. J-DISC MIR, whose team includes members of CU’s Engineering Department and Computer Music Center, uses audio signal processing, which quantizes and classifies data derived from digital audio files, and machine learning, a process of teaching computers to “listen,” based on examples with given musical parameters, which can then be applied to larger samples than humans can apprehend or work through.
Read more here.