Machine learning and artificial intelligence have great potential to help researchers understand and classify musical scores and other symbolic musical data, but the difficulty of preparing and extracting characteristics (features) from symbolic scores has hindered musicologists (and others who examine scores closely) from using these techniques. This paper describes the “feature” capabilities ...

Chord labels for recorded audio are in high demand both as an end product used by musicologists and hobby musicians and as an input feature for music similarity applications. Many past algorithms for chord labelling are based on chromagrams, but distribution of energy in chroma frames is not well understood. Furthermore, non-chord notes complicate chord estimation. We present a new approach whi...

The musical discourse may be described in terms of an intricate flow of local groupings. Such groupings, whose perception does not always reach a state of explicit awareness, mostly remain in an informal form, except the most predominant of them, which contribute to more global constructions and will be remembered as the characteristic thematic materials of the musical piece. There have been so...

M athematics and music have been intertwined in a long-running drama that stretches back to ancient times and has featured contributions from many great minds, including Pythagoras, Euclid, Mersenne, Descartes, Galileo, Euler, Helmholtz, and many others (see, e.g., [1]). Applications of mathematics to music continue to develop in today’s digital world, which also supports active communities of ...

This chapter examines connections between research in music, neurology, and psychology during the late-nineteenth century. Researchers in all three disciplines investigated how music is processed by the brain. Psychologists and comparative musicologists, such as Carl Stumpf, thought in terms of multiple levels of sensory processing and mental representation. Early thinking about music processin...

While a vast amount of editorial metadata is being actively gathered and used by music collectors and enthusiasts, it is often neglected by music information retrieval and musicology researchers. In this paper we propose to explore Discogs, one of the largest databases of such data available in the public domain. Our main goal is to show how largescale analysis of its editorial metadata can rai...

In the opera Tristan und Isolde Richard Wagner reports the poisoning of Tristan and Isolde by a “love potion.” Shortly after ingestion of the potion, the protagonists declare their love, and both die during the opera. The opera has been extensively interpreted by psychoanalysts and musicologists, but, although at least Isolde’s death remains unexplained and might be due to the potion, the medic...

A significant barrier to the research endeavours of musicologists (and humanities scholars more generally) is the sheer amount of potentially relevant information that has accumulated over centuries. Whereas researchers once faced the daunting prospect of physically scouring through endless primary and secondary sources in order to answer the basic whats, wheres and whens of history, these sour...

This paper describes an analyzer that automatically generates the metrical structure of a generative theory of tonal music (GTTM). Although a fully automatic time-span tree analyzer has been developed, musicologists have to correct the errors in the metrical structure. In light of this, we use a deep learning technique for generating the metrical structure of a GTTM. Because we only have 300 pi...