Periodic Reporting for period 4 - IRiMaS (Interactive Research in Music as Sound:Transforming Digital Musicology)
Período documentado: 2022-04-01 hasta 2023-03-31
IRiMaS is a five-year project (2017-2023) funded by a €2.5m European Research Council Advanced Grant. This ground-breaking project’s aim is to harness the potential of C21st technology to research interactive aural approaches to music analysis, and to musicology more broadly. Building on earlier work, the project has devised generic software tools and specific case studies developing and demonstrating the potential of working with software to facilitate direct engagement with music as sound as part of musicological research. The project significantly expands ideas and techniques previously explored in the context of electroacoustic music in the AHRC-funded project TaCEM, Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music, and in earlier work on Interactive Aural Analysis. It has further developed this approach, making it applicable across the whole range of different musics.
In an age when technology is revolutionizing the ways in which music is made and distributed, the IRiMaS project aims correspondingly to transform approaches to musicology, moving from a primarily fixed, text-based approach to one that incorporates as an integral feature the interactive and aural. It brings skills and expertise from music technology to assist in the development of research strategies and software to enable musicological research to engage more directly with sound. It pioneers a ground-breaking approach to music research in which dynamic interaction with sound is fundamental, and music’s temporal and transient nature are central to research investigations and their dissemination, presenting a significant conceptual challenge to the traditional textual bias of much musical research and leading to new enhanced modes of musicological knowledge. Unlike much current Digital Musicology, rather than using software primarily to extract quantized data or to automatise the analysis process, IRiMaS takes interactive engagement with sound as the foundation for research.
In an age when technology is revolutionizing the ways in which music is made and distributed, the IRiMaS project aims correspondingly to transform approaches to musicology, moving from a primarily fixed, text-based approach to one that incorporates as an integral feature the interactive and aural. It brings skills and expertise from music technology to assist in the development of research strategies and software to enable musicological research to engage more directly with sound. It pioneers a ground-breaking approach to music research in which dynamic interaction with sound is fundamental, and music’s temporal and transient nature are central to research investigations and their dissemination, presenting a significant conceptual challenge to the traditional textual bias of much musical research and leading to new enhanced modes of musicological knowledge. Unlike much current Digital Musicology, rather than using software primarily to extract quantized data or to automatise the analysis process, IRiMaS takes interactive engagement with sound as the foundation for research.
The main objectives of the IRiMaS project were: a) to develop a digital toolbox to facilitate musicologists in producing their own interactive aural analyses, and b) to extend the Interactive Aural approach (IAA) to music analysis beyond the repertoire of electroacoustic music for which it was first developed to a wide range of musics, in particular to those musics for which traditional classical Western notation is not especially suited or appropriate, such as improvised music, oral/aural traditions including music from other cultures and contemporary spectral music.
a) has been achieved and the digital toolbox, TIAALS (Tools for Interactive Aural Analysis), is now freely available in versions for Mac OS and Windows on the project website. This software was developed by the postdocs on the project (Dr Frédéric Dufeu and Dr Keitaro Takahashi), with additional expertise in PC programming (Francesco Camelli) for part of the project, and with input from Senior Staff member Axel Roebel and overseen by the PI. The design of the toolbox was undertaken in dialogue between the programming team and the musicologists on the project, both PhD students and Senior Staff.
b) has been achieved through the research of the PhD students, Maria Sappho Donohue and Cristina Ghirardini, and senior staff Profs. Robert Adlington, Amanda Bayley and Jonathan Stock, together with the PI and disseminated through a series of conference papers and publications. A selection of these is to be published in the book Inside Music: Digital Playgrounds for Music. These include studies of Free Improvisation, the Italian tradition of ottava rima, contemporary spectral music, popular music, and classical Western Music.
a) has been achieved and the digital toolbox, TIAALS (Tools for Interactive Aural Analysis), is now freely available in versions for Mac OS and Windows on the project website. This software was developed by the postdocs on the project (Dr Frédéric Dufeu and Dr Keitaro Takahashi), with additional expertise in PC programming (Francesco Camelli) for part of the project, and with input from Senior Staff member Axel Roebel and overseen by the PI. The design of the toolbox was undertaken in dialogue between the programming team and the musicologists on the project, both PhD students and Senior Staff.
b) has been achieved through the research of the PhD students, Maria Sappho Donohue and Cristina Ghirardini, and senior staff Profs. Robert Adlington, Amanda Bayley and Jonathan Stock, together with the PI and disseminated through a series of conference papers and publications. A selection of these is to be published in the book Inside Music: Digital Playgrounds for Music. These include studies of Free Improvisation, the Italian tradition of ottava rima, contemporary spectral music, popular music, and classical Western Music.
New methodologies were central to the original IRiMaS proposal and have remained so. Traditionally the results of musicological inquiry have usually been printed on paper, verbal accounts with the addition charts and diagrams. (Hans Keller’s functional analyses and Heinrich Schenker’s graphical representations are rare exceptions). This was perhaps inevitable in the past but technology now enables us to incorporate direct engagement with aural and visual material into both the methodology of music research and the presentation of its findings. Musicologists have increasingly been linking their texts to online audio examples but this is far from the level of integration and interaction that we are seeking to develop. Researchers have also increasingly employed software to extract statistical data from scores or recordings, and also to work with Big Data from across large repertoires using AI and other algorithms to discover new trends and features. All this can indeed be valuable, but the originality of IRiMaS is to use computers in a different way (though we may incorporate aspects of some of these approaches): IRiMaS uses software so that musical sound, and the experience of hearing this sound, can become central to the research methodology and its presentation. Musical sound is continuous, flowing and temporal whereas scores, words and data extracted from recordings are static and discrete, and whilst they may provide useful insights, isolated from sound, they may also distort or limit the investigation. So, building on earlier work relating to the analysis of electroacoustic music, IRiMaS aims to expand an innovative ‘interactive aural’ methodology for music analysis to a much wider repertoire. In doing so it focuses especially on those musics that do not fit so comfortably with traditional Western notation. For example, improvised music, oral/aural traditions in world music, and contemporary music in which the use of extended playing techniques and concern with timbre stretch traditional notation to its limit. These areas underpin the three main Case Studies for the project, but our research also incorporates some traditionally notated music and has been investigating how such an approach might facilitate deeper consideration of aspects of such repertoire that are often neglected such as timbre, texture, articulation, and dynamics.
The IRiMaS software, TIAALS, is intended to be of use to any musicologist without the need for specialist computing skills. This is important because our ambition is that these tools will become a standard approach. Such software also has the potential to change the working relationship between the musicologist and their audience. If the materials are interactive there is more potential, more encouragement, for readers to explore for themselves, to develop additional or alternative interpretations of the music. A leading music researcher, Kofi Agawu, has promoted the idea of music analysis as ‘a mode of composition or a mode of performance’ and encouraged analysis as ‘play’. We aim for our interactive software to encourage a creative, playful approach to music analysis both by the researchers and their audiences. This is something we already see in work we have completed and something that we hope will continue to grow in importance as our TIAALS software is used by others.
The IRiMaS software, TIAALS, is intended to be of use to any musicologist without the need for specialist computing skills. This is important because our ambition is that these tools will become a standard approach. Such software also has the potential to change the working relationship between the musicologist and their audience. If the materials are interactive there is more potential, more encouragement, for readers to explore for themselves, to develop additional or alternative interpretations of the music. A leading music researcher, Kofi Agawu, has promoted the idea of music analysis as ‘a mode of composition or a mode of performance’ and encouraged analysis as ‘play’. We aim for our interactive software to encourage a creative, playful approach to music analysis both by the researchers and their audiences. This is something we already see in work we have completed and something that we hope will continue to grow in importance as our TIAALS software is used by others.