Performed music is the form of music we most often hear, music that is shaped by musicians and communicated to listeners. This is the music that we experience, it is also the music that affects us. But we have few tools with which to describe the fleeting experience of music, or the work of performers who create these experiences. The project COSMOS (https://cosmos.ircam.fr|http://bit.ly/COSMOS-YouTube) is about finding ways to represent the ephemeral qualities of music, namely, its expressivity and the musical structures that result from performers manipulating this expressivity.
The scientific approach leverages developments in citizen science, data science/analytics, and performance studies to represent performers’ know-how in efficient ways that are scalable to large datasets. The research themes are: i) to build software tools to enable people to find, represent, explore, and talk about performed structures; ii) to harness volunteer thinking (citizen science) to dissect the musical structures experienced in performance and in performed music; iii) to create sandbox environments that allow users to experiment with making performed structures; iv) to develop theoretical frameworks to discover the reasoning behind musical structures perceived and made; and, v) to foster community engagement by training experts to provide feedback on structure solutions so as to increase public understanding of the creative work in music performance.
This research has broad implications for society because engaging with music is a near universal experience. Music listeners respond not only to its content but are also deeply influenced by how performers express that content. Being able to characterise the nature of musical communication not only offers new ways to explore and talk about music performance, it also serves as a bedrock for connecting the essentials of the musical experience to human response. These developments will open up new paths to explaining physiological reactions to music, with implications for therapeutic uses of music.
