Technical research topics
Semantic Web Technologies
All of the Transforming Musicology research topics, and all the mini-projects, present research activities that generate data that could be reused – whether by the authors or by others – in valuable, unpredictable ways, provided that data could be published in a way that supports such reuse. Through collaboration with the other researchers, and observation of their working practices, we observed how open sharing of data and research workflows might be smoothly achieved. Using semantic web technologies, we also developed ontologies to model some of the data structures used and explored ways of visualising and analysing the data.
Main researchers: Kevin Page, Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, David Lewis, David De Roure, Ben Fields, Richard Lewis
Selected key papers:
David M. Weigl, David Lewis, Tim Crawford, Ian Knöpke & Kevin Page (2017). ‘On providing semantic alignment and unified access to music-library metadata’. International Journal of Digital Libraries [Springer | https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-017-0223-9].
David Lewis, Kevin Page & Andrew Hankinson (May 2017) ‘Capturing context and provenance of musicology research’. In Music Encoding Conference, Tours.
Kevin Page and Carolin Rindfleisch (March 2017), ‘Linking Leitmotifs: A Digital Study of Leitmotif Interpretations through Ontologically Contextualised Notation’, In International Musicological Society, Tokyo.
Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, Alan Dix, David M. Weigl, and Kevin R. Page (August 2016). ‘In Collaboration with In Concert: Reflecting a Digital Library as Linked Data for Performance Ephemera’. In Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM 2016). New York, NY. [acm |DOI:10.1145/2970044.2970049]
Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, and Kevin R. Page (June 2016). ‘Bridging complex heterogeneous datasets, workflows, and projects in 'Transforming Musicology'’. In 3rd Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) Conference. Hobart, Tasmania.
Terhi Nurmikko-Fuller, David M. Weigl, and Kevin R. Page (June 2015). ‘On organising multimedia performance corpora for musicological study using Linked Data’. In Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM 2015). Knoxville, TN. [acm |DOI: 10.1145/2785527.2785532]
Audio and symbolic features and retrieval
Many of the musicological questions addressed in the Transforming Musicology research topics rely on tools that interrogate collections of digital recordings and scores. From the starting point of existing algorithms, search tools and software, such as audioDB (developed in the OMRAS2 project), we explored how they could best be extended and deployed for the use of musicologists.
Main researchers: Mark Sandler, Christophe Rhodes, Ken O'Hanlon, Gabin-Wilfried Kayumbi, Ben Fields, David Lewis
Selected key publications:
Tim Crawford & David Lewis (May 2017). ‘Early modern cover song detection: finding concordances in mixed-notation corpora of early music’. In Music Encoding Conference, Tours.
David Lewis, Tim Crawford, and Daniel Müllensiefen (August 2016). ‘Instrumental Idiom in the 16th Century: Embellishment Patterns in Arrangements of Vocal Music’. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2016). New York, NY. [pdf]
Mid-level semantic music representation
Whilst the digital representation of scores and audio is relatively well studied, as the information that we want to indicate addresses higher-level structures there is an increasing need to establish reusable ontologies for communicating these structures. In this topic, Transforming Musicology explored ways of achieving this practically, creating new structures only where necessary, and taking advantage of existing ontologies where they are available.
Main researchers: Geraint Wiggins, Nick Harley, Tim Crawford, David Lewis, Kevin Page
Selected key papers:
Kevin R. Page, David Lewis, and Carolin Rindfleisch (May 2016). ‘Prototypical Scenarios for Contextual Navigation with MEI and Linked Data’. In Music Encoding Conference (MEC 2016). Montréal, Canada.
Nicholas Harley, and Geraint Wiggins (October 2015). ‘An Ontology for Abstract, Hierarchical Music Representation’. In Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR 2015). Málaga, Spain. [pdf]
