Periodic Reporting for period 4 - IRiMaS (Interactive Research in Music as Sound:Transforming Digital Musicology)
Période du rapport: 2022-04-01 au 2023-03-31
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.
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.
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.