Periodic Reporting for period 3 - COSMOS (COSMOS: Computational Shaping and Modeling of Musical Structures)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-06-01 al 2023-11-30
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.
The premise of COSMOS and the use of a reproducing piano to gather data for performance research has been explained in a short film, Le Piano Virtuose (https://youtu.be/yXkwusNyte4) disseminated on Le Monde and CNRS Le Journal. Expressive manipulations in musical communication was explored in a widely viewed ARTE.TV documentary on hearing, Entendons-nous tous pareil ? (https://youtu.be/JcxhaGdapE0). The COSMOS project was one of 15 featured in the ERC 10k Grantees Celebration – https://erc.europa.eu/how-ERC-transformed-science/#Chew
The therapeutic potential of linking performed structures with physiological response was covered in Klänge Fürs Herz (https://bit.ly/ec-Spiegel20) in Der Spiegel. Discussions started at an exploratory seminar at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study bringing together computational music information research and cardiac therapeutics led to a Scientific American Opinion article on How Music Can Literally Heal the Heart (https://bit.ly/sciam-musicheart). The potential for exploiting computational music performance research for heart health is laid out in a presentation for clinicians and patients, Music: An Underutilised Tool in Neurocardiology? (https://youtu.be/7oSdvgv3JMQ).
Applying techniques for transcribing rhythms of performance to abnormal heart rhythms produced arrhythmia music like the Little Etudes for Piano (https://youtu.be/42TRIL9MeOA) powerful inscriptions of heart rhythm anomalies. Empirical justification for notating cardiac arrhythmias using music representations is described in a European Heart Journal CardioPulse article, Putting (One’s) Heart Into Music (https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehab108) which was among the top 10 downloaded CardioPulse articles in 2021.