Unlocking Musicology: Digital Engagement for Digital Research

Lead Research Organisation: University of Oxford
Department Name: Engineering Science

Abstract

'Unlocking Musicology: Digital Engagement for Digital Research' will take methods and analyses from musicologists and show that, because they were undertaken digitally, we can more easily make use of them beyond academia. This might be so that commercial companies, like publishers, can better index or display their music and music-related holdings; or to help cultural and charitable bodies holding rich collections of our musical heritage make these more accessible. The digital foundation for this reuse was laid in our precursor Transforming Musicology project, which adopted Linked Data descriptions during development of its data, methods and results.

The project will build four proof-of-concept demonstrators, with four different partners, as examples of our approach. These will be made available online for all (including the worldwide public) to explore, and unlock novel and exciting ways of accessing musical content.

With our first partner, the New York Philharmonic orchestra, we will create Linked Data for their Leon Levy Digital Archives, then assign Semantic Web relationships with similar corpora of concert ephemera in the UK. Our demonstrator will allow users to browse seamlessly between collections using automatically generated links of, for example, performances of the same work by different orchestras, or following guest conductors as they move between ensembles. Digital items from the archive will enrich these explorations, such as production photographs, or annotated conducting scores.

We will work with the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) to analyse the content in their comprehensive international bibliography of writings on music covering publications from the early 19th century to the present. Here we will use network analyses to identify communities of interests and terms, and provide interactive visualisations to assist the publisher and their customers find material in their holdings.

As well as large collections where we help explore the unknown, we will also develop novel user interfaces to explain music that is very well studied. Working with Prof. Laurence Dreyfus, we will design a 'digital companion' to illustrate his reappraisal of Wagner's use of motifs and themes in Lohengrin. Here we will deploy cutting-edge music encoding and Linked Data technology to highlight, then display or play, the motifs in Prof. Dreyfus's narrative. Synchronised multimedia content will be automatically configured as the reader moves through the essay, interacts with a score, or as a narrated video by Prof. Dreyfus is played. Alternatively the user can drive the experience along their own pathway, with the essay, video, audio, and notation being retrieved as they browse.

Our final demonstrator will be in partnership with the Internet Archive, custodians of the Wayback Machine and the Live Music Archive, which contains over 170,000 high quality recordings of live concerts. While computers can be used to automatically analyse these audio files and perform basic retrieval tasks, the typical characteristics of a live show - improvisation, audience noise, stage banter, variable acoustics - often confound algorithms. We will take a more nuanced approach, using tools which can combine computational analyses with musicological judgement, to search for 'lost' performances of band standards, and see how artists change their performance of the same song over time.

During the project we will share our progress and insights with our partners, and pass on how they can use these methods for themselves. At the end of the project we will host a public showcasing event in Oxford with a lecture and hands-on demonstrations of the proof-of-concepts we've developed with our partners.

Planned Impact

'Unlocking Musicology: Digital Engagement for Digital Research' will demonstrate that the methods and techniques of digital musicology can be effectively reapplied in non-academic contexts, and that their digital nature is a transformational enabler in doing so. The particular approach taken in Transforming Musicology, of ensuring workflows and results are well described using Linked Data, is the foundation for this re-use, and is a validation of that digital realisation. Academic digital musicologists will be able to take this project as a template and inspiration for their future impact and engagement. Furthermore, project activities will inform our own future research: through experience of testing our methods and tools against new data, and in identifying new digital musicology research challenges while working with our partners' collections.

Our partners - writers, publishers, and third sector archives - will find their collections unlocked by the considered analytical approaches developed by musicologists, which can be reapplied and adapted due to their digital realisation. We will create specific Proof of Concept demonstrators for each partner and their collection. We will also release our tools and documentation for their reuse and adoption within our partner organisations, and deliver workshops to embed our approaches in their work.

The musically-interested general public will benefit from gain greater insight and easier access into the rich cultural materials in our partner's archives and collections, and new interfaces to help them understand and explore contexts and arguments. Our proof of concepts will be accessible to all via the web, with our software freely available for others to reuse and adapt.

Publications

10 25 50
 
Title Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion 
Description The Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion is a touch-based tablet app for exploration and visualisation of the motives in Wagner's opera Lohengrin, based upon an analysis by Prof. Laurence Dreyfus in his essay "Asking a Forbidden Question: A new view of musical themes in Wagner's Lohengrin". The Digital Companion was created by the Unlocking Musicology project (AH/R004803/1), and includes an enriched version of the essay alongside novel interactive explorations of score (notation), libretto, orchestration, and audio. The app also includes a 30 minute video "Rethinking Wagner's 'Leitmotifs': An introduction to the Lohengrin TimeMachine". The Digital Companion was built using technology in the MELD framework (Music Encoding and Linked Data), which was developed by a team at the University of Oxford through the EPSRC-funded FAST project (EP/L019981/1). 
Type Of Art Artefact (including digital) 
Year Produced 2019 
Impact The application is intended to be accessible to enthusiastic amateurs as well as scholars, and concerns Wagner's use of motives in his early opera, Lohengrin, arguing for a more sophisticated understanding than 'Leitmotif' guides often communicate. 
URL https://um.web.ox.ac.uk/lohengrin
 
Description Through four partnerships -- with RILM, the New York Philharmonic Archives, the Internet Archive, and Laurence Dreyfus -- Unlocking Musicology has demonstrated that methods and techniques from digital musicology can be applied effectively in broader, non-academic, contexts. Behind each of the software demonstrators developed with our partners, the project used Linked Data as a common approach for bringing together the different formats of digital material associated with music, be it text, image, score, or audio.
Exploitation Route The 'Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion' and 'Listening through Time' demonstrators provide a template for translating abstract or academic analyses into interactive multimedia software applications. Videos and live versions of the software have been made available online, for reference. The approach taken in Unlocking Musicology is suitable for use by libraries and other digital collections of music-related material, indeed we have since developed an additional demonstrator in partnership with the Digital Delius project using material with the British Library. The source code for these demonstrators is publicly available, as is the source code for the underlying MELD framework used by the apps, providing a ready foundation for future use by others.

Source code for the Semantic Alignment and Linking Tool (SALT) software is also freely available, as used by Unlocking Musicology to undertake semantic alignment over RILM's bibliographic data. A description of this work is available online, so that further holders of bibliographic metadata might adopt these tools and techniques.

Our investigation of the Internet Archive Live Music Archive provides a reference example of a study using a large-scale audio dataset, and is available online. It builds upon existing metadata and audio feature data published by the CALMA activity in the FAST project, which in turn uses openly available algorithms which could be used with other large scale audio datasets.
Sectors Creative Economy

Culture

Heritage

Museums and Collections

URL https://um.web.ox.ac.uk/
 
Description Findings from Unlocking Musicology were applied throughout the project to the tools and approaches used to explore musicological data from RILM, the New York Philharmonic Archives, the Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion, and the Internet Archive Live Music Archive. In addition, innovations in use of our MELD (Music Encoding and Linked Data) framework for annotation of live music performances have already contributed to public understanding of music resources through our collaboration with the Digital Delius project and British Library. Alongside demonstrating and illuminating specific new uses of the digital materials held by these organisations, and the value this adds, the project has successfully transferred knowledge about tools and approaches into these non-academic contexts. These findings have also been summarised and presented to a wider audience of professionals and the interested general public through our 'Narratives through Data' engagement event.
First Year Of Impact 2018
Sector Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural

 
Description Beethoven in the House: Digital Studies of Domestic Music Arrangements
Amount £283,560 (GBP)
Funding ID AH/T01279X/1 
Organisation Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 02/2020 
End 10/2022
 
Description CORSICA (EarlyMuse STSM)
Amount € 17,500 (EUR)
Organisation European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) 
Sector Public
Country Belgium
Start 02/2024 
End 07/2024
 
Description Digital Elgar: curating sound and place at a composer birthplace
Amount £37,672 (GBP)
Funding ID 0007835 
Organisation University of Oxford 
Department John Fell Fund
Sector Academic/University
Country United Kingdom
Start 01/2020 
End 09/2020
 
Description Collaboration with Digital Delius project 
Organisation University of Oxford
Department Faculty of Music
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution Through participation in the Digital Delius project, we extended beyond our initially expected involvement to use a MELD annotation tool developed in Unlocking Musicology during a string quartet masterclass study in February 2018. This work then became part of a public event for Digital Delius at the British Library. The underlying MELD software framework used in this work was developed during the FAST project by the team at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre.
Collaborator Contribution The University of Oxford Faculty of Music organised and ran the string quartet masterclass, and the Digital Delius project.
Impact An informational video of the string quartet masterclass was produced and published by the Faculty of Music. The masterclass annotation experiment was included during presentations at a public event held at the British Library. The masterclass annotation experiment formed an element of the work reported in our paper reported elsewhere in this submission (doi:10.1145/3273024.3273038) The masterclass annotation experiment formed an element of our presentation at the "Scores of Scores" event reported elsewhere in this submission. This was a multi-disciplinary digital musicology collaboration, brining together aspects of computer science, information engineering, and musicology.
Start Year 2018
 
Description Collaboration with mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna 
Organisation University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Country Austria 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution The Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework was originated and created at the University of Oxford, and refined through a series of subsequent projects in which it was applied; similarly the musicological model developed during Beethoven in the House (BitH), which can be used to structure musicological annotations within MELD apps.
Collaborator Contribution MELD and the BitH model have since been adopted and extended by researchers at mdw - University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna - including in the 'Signature Sound Vienna' (SSV) project.
Impact * Data interoperability between MELD-related projects at Oxford and Vienna; * Coordination of tool development to maximise complementarity, sustainability, and re-use; * A workshop held in February 2023 to align and synchronise ongoing complementary development of MELD and the BitH model; * A joint tutorial at Digital Humanities 2023 using both the BitH and SSV annotator tools.
Start Year 2022
 
Description Collaboration with the Learn To Play project 
Organisation Goldsmiths, University of London
Department Department of Computing
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution In collaboration with the Learn To Play project at Goldsmiths University of London we have added annotations to record performance ("playability") to our MELD software, which was then used in the Digital Delius string quartet masterclass experiment.
Collaborator Contribution The Learn To Play project and team specialise in the description of playability, helping us refine these notions within our research tools.
Impact The refinement of MELD annotation capture for performance the foundation for our work with the Digital Delius project (reported elsewhere in this submission). The findings of our joint work with Learn To Play on performance and playability annotations resulted in a joint paper on the topic given to the Music Encoding Conference 2018 (reported elsewhere in this submission).
Start Year 2018
 
Description E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation Austrian National Library
Country Austria 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
Description E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Country Austria 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
Description E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation University of Vienna
Department Institute of Musicology
Country Austria 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
Description E-LAUTE Advisory panel membership 
Organisation Vienna University of Technology
Country Austria 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution As a member of the advisory panel, I advise the project more generally, but I am also closely engaged in developing the Music Encoding Initiative standard to support the work of this team
Collaborator Contribution The partners are part of a research project aiming to make digital editions of German lute music
Impact Development of the MEI schema and documentation. The collaboration includes music performance, music editing, German studies and information science.
Start Year 2023
 
Description LinkedMusic project collaboration 
Organisation McGill University
Country Canada 
Sector Academic/University 
PI Contribution The principal investigator and a research team member are invited collaborators with the Canadian SSHRC-funded 'LinkedMusic' project, based at McGill University, where they contribute their accumulated expertise in digital music information systems and their application to digital musicology.
Collaborator Contribution The goal of the LinkedMusic Partnership is to link music databases through metadata schemas: structures for organizing information stored in a database. This will go a long way towards bringing online music search to the same level of sophistication currently possible for text-based resources, allowing us to answer fundamental questions about music and how it interacts with human creativity, society, culture, and history.
Impact -
Start Year 2022
 
Description New York Philharmonic Digital Archives 
Organisation New York Philharmonic
Country United States 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution The New York Philharmonic orchestra were a partner in the Unlocking Musicology project. Specifically, we worked with the Archives team to use our semantic technologies, tools, and methods to create new methods for discovering and exploring content within the unique digital archives of the NY Phil.
Collaborator Contribution The New York Philharmonic Digital Archive team have provided expertise, motivation, and guidance in our development of novel tools for exploring archive content.
Impact This is a multi-disciplinary collaboration combining elements of computer science, information engineering, musicology, and the professional cataloguing and archiving activities of the NY Phil Archive. We used the MELD technology framework, originally developed in the FAST project, to create an interactive exploration of digital materials around the NY Phil Archive's interviews with current and past orchestra members - "Listening through Time".
Start Year 2018
 
Description Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) 
Organisation RILM International Center
Country United States 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) was a partner in the Unlocking Musicology project, and an organisation which seeks to provide a comprehensive and accurate representation of musicology in all countries and languages, and across all disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Our work with the organisation involved bringing semantic technologies developed by the digital musicology team at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre to the bibliographic data of RILM, both to help reconcile records within that data, and identify patterns through network analysis and visualisation.
Collaborator Contribution RILM are the international leaders in producing a comprehensive bibliography of musicological writings; this unique dataset provides a unique opportunity to test the efficacy of our research methods and tools, and build a partnership to embed these processes within a commercial organisation. RILM have provided access to their data, and the time and assistance of members of their technical teams.
Impact This was a multi-disciplinary collaboration combining elements of computer science, information engineering, musicology, and the professional cataloguing and archiving activities of RILM. The collaboration resulted in the application of the 'SALT' (Semantic Alignment and Linking Tool) software to RILM data, and trialling of its utility within RILM. We also produced network analyses and visualisations of the RILM bibliography data, to gain insight into patterns and trends within this information.
Start Year 2018
 
Description Software Sustainability Instittute: Best practice for testing in DH software development 
Organisation Software Sustainability Institute
Country United Kingdom 
Sector Public 
PI Contribution As a project for the Software Sustainability Institute, team member Graham Klyne is assessing the most effective ways to implement software testing methodologies in the context of Digital Humanities projects. As a case study, Graham is implementing a test framework for the MELD software (Music Encoding and Linked Data, developed during the FAST project) as it has been deployed by the Unlocking Musicology project.
Collaborator Contribution The Software Sustainability Institute facilitates the advancement of software in research by cultivating better, more sustainable, research software to enable world-class research ("Better software, better research").
Impact Published code for software development testing (see repository link). Project report and recommendations.
Start Year 2020
 
Description The Internet Archive (Live Music Archive) 
Organisation Internet Archive
Country United States 
Sector Charity/Non Profit 
PI Contribution This was a three-way collaboration between the AHRC-funded Unlocking Musicology project, the Internet Archive, and the EPSRC-funded FAST project. In earlier work, researchers from the FAST project at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary University of London had created a dataset (CALMA - Computational Analysis of the Live Music Archive), layering Linked Data metadata and computationally extracted features over audio recordings held in the Internet Archive's Live Music Archive. The University of Oxford team then created investigatory and analytic software tools (rCALMA) through which to empirically explore this data. In the Unlocking Musicology project, researchers at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre used the rCALMA tools to undertake a musicological investigation within the Live Music Archive, via the CALMA dataset. These investigations focussed on the music of the bands The Smashing Pumpkins and The Grateful Dead. For the latter, this was combined with archival research in the Grateful Dead Archives, part of the University of California Santa Cruz Libraries Special Collections.
Collaborator Contribution The Internet Archive contributed support, guidance, advice and expertise in accessing the Live Music Archive data. This was crucial for our initial musicological surveys of such a large-scale resource, both in terms of computational access, and identifying a fertile scope for beginning our studies.
Impact This is a multi-disciplinary collaboration combining elements of computer science, information engineering, musicology, and the cataloguing and archiving activities of the Internet Archive. Reflections on our initial musicological findings have been published as a 'microsite' on the Unlocking Musicology website.
Start Year 2018
 
Description 'Beethoven and Beyond' Panel, International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres conference 2023 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact Panel of speakers from our project, speaking on "Beethoven and beyond: reflections on digital studies of musical arrangements" (at IAML 2023 in Cambridge) with discussion during and afterwards. Audience primarily of music librarians, with library scientists and musicologists also present. Connecting library and archive digitisation and publication with musicological practice and the possibilities of digital tooling to support these.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://www.iaml.info/congresses/2023-cambridge
 
Description 'Digital companions - approaches and opportunities', The Future of Digital Editions of Music conference, March 2023 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact Conference bringing together musicologists, digital musicologists, editors, music publishers and librarians, looking at practical ways to use the possibilities of digital technology in music editions without sacrificing quality or disregarding economic concerns. Discussions included planning future projects and collaborations, and proposals to survey stakeholder groups, especially professional and amateur musicians who might use the editions.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description 'Pragmatic digital musicology', Algomus seminar (invited talk), Lille 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Invited talk for a seminar (title 'Pragmatic digital musicology') as part of a 2-day visit to a digital musicology research group. After the presentation, the group presented their work, and possible avenues for collaboration were explored.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
 
Description 'Scores of Scores': Possibilities and Pitfalls with Musical Corpora 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact The 'Scores of Scores' event combined elements of a conference, workshop, hackathon, and 'encodathon', bringing academia, industry, and the public together in order to connect people, promote a lively dialogue, and set the future direction for musical corpus creation and uses.

The Unlocking Musicology team presented 'Digital annotation of live performance: toolkits and practical experiences, from Wagner to Delius' and engaged in discussion.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
URL https://www.bigdata.cam.ac.uk/events/scores-scores-possibilities-and-pitfalls-musical-corpora
 
Description An Overview of Digital Musicology and an Introduction to Music Encoding 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Kevin Page presented an an overview of digital musicology to the 'Introduction to Digital Humanities' strand at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
URL https://digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-humanities-oxford-summer-school
 
Description DReAM Lab workshop: Linked Data for the Humanities 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Dream Lab (Digital Resources and Methods) is a week-long digital humanities training opportunity hosted at the University of Pennsylvania and designed to help humanists become more confident and thoughtful users, creators and critics of digital technology.

19 people attended the 'Linked Data for the Humanities: a semantic web of scholarly data' workshop run and taught by Kevin Page and David Lewis. This drew upon data and tools developed at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre, including from the FAST, Unlocking Musicology, Linked Art, and Mapping Manuscript Migrations projects.

Delegates left the workshop with practical experience, new knowledge, and enthusiasm for Linked Data approaches, alongside new familiarity with these projects.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Digital Delius: Unlocking Digitised Music Manuscripts 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact This public event at the British Library launched a new digital exhibition showcasing the music of British-born composer Frederick Delius (1862-1934), including a live performance by the Villiers String Quartet. Bringing together digitised sources including scores and sketches, early recordings, photographs, and concert programmes, the exhibition is complemented by expert commentary and interactive digital tools.

As part of the event organised by the Digital Delius project, Unlocking Musicology team members participated in a panel to describe how technology, built on standards such as the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and Linked Data, can enrich engagement with musical sources and give an insight into the creative process.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
URL https://www.oerc.ox.ac.uk/Digital-Delius
 
Description Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2018 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Members of the Unlocking Musicology team organised and led teaching for the Digital Musicology workshop at DHOxSS 2018. The workshop is one of few opportunities worldwide to learn about practically applying computational and informatics approaches to music and musicology during a single week-long course. The workshop was attended by 18 people from a variety of backgrounds (academic, libraries, archives, industry).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
URL http://dhoxss.wixsite.com/dhoxss-2018/digital-musicology
 
Description Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2019 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Members of the Unlocking Musicology and FAST project teams organised and led teaching for the Digital Musicology workshop at DHOxSS 2019 between the 22nd and 26th July 2019. The convener was Kevin Page. The workshop is one of few opportunities worldwide to learn about practically applying computational and informatics approaches to music and musicology during a single week-long course. The workshop was attended by 18 people from a variety of backgrounds (academic, libraries, archives, industry).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Digital Musicology workshop at the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School 2023 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Members of the project team organised and led teaching for the Digital Musicology workshop at DHOxSS 2023. The workshop is one of few opportunities offered worldwide to learn about practically applying computational and informatics approaches to music and musicology during a single week-long course. The workshop was attended by 8 people from a variety of backgrounds (academic, libraries, archives, industry).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Digital Musicology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective - talk at Digital Humanities at Oxford online 2021 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Kevin Page delivered the presentation 'Digital Musicology - An Interdisciplinary Perspective' to a plenary session of the 2021 Digital Humanities at Oxford online event (held as an alternative to the usual in-person Digital Humanities Summer School).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2021
 
Description Expert workshop for US-based 'Measuring Polyphony' project 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Part of a panel of experts invited to participate in a workshop as part of the Measuring Polyphony project, which developed tools to support transcribing and editing medieval and renaissance musical sources.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020
URL https://measuringpolyphony.org/
 
Description General chair of Digital Libraries for Musicology 2019 conference (DLfM 2019), 9th November 2019, The Hague, Netherlands (Kevin Page) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Kevin Page was general chair of the DLfM 2019 conference, held at The Royal Library of the Netherlands in The Hague on 9th November 2019. The programme consisted of 13 papers presented by international authors to an international audience, and continues DLfM's role as one of the premier events for research in this area.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://dlfm.web.ox.ac.uk/2019-proceedings
 
Description Guest lecture to Oxford Brookes University Faculty of Humanities doctoral training programme 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Kevin Page gave the talk 'An interdisciplinary perspective on Digital Humanities' to the humanities doctoral training programme at Oxford Brookes University.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022
 
Description Hosting and participation of Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) technical working meeting 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Other audiences
Results and Impact The annual face-to-face technical working meeting of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) was hosted by the digital musicology team at the University of Oxford e-Research Centre between 30/10/2018 and 02/11/2018. Version 4.0 of the MEI Schema was released at the meeting.

Information about the Music Encoding Initiative:
https://music-encoding.org/about

Information about MEI 4.0:
https://music-encoding.org/update/2018/11/01/mei40.html
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
 
Description Hosting of and participation in Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) Special Interest Group meeting on tablatures 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Co-hosted the Special Interest Group on tablatures (including guitar tab) in a working meeting for guideline and encoding development between 18/12/2019 and 19/12/2019
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Internet Archive, December 2019 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact Kevin Page visited the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco, USA, to showcase the demonstrator using Live Music Archive data created by the Unlocking Musicology project, with technologies from the FAST project. He discussed opportunities for future collaboration with Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and Founder of the Internet Archive, considering how materials in the archive might be better utilised by musicologists.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Invited Lecture, 'Practicalities of sharing humanities data', Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Invited talk entitled 'Practicalities of sharing humanities data: Studying arrangements of nineteenth-century music', Musikwissenschaft JGU Mainz: Gastvortrag. JGU Mainz, Germany 28 April 2023. The talk focussed on practical approaches to open, linked data with the aim of informing policy at an active DH institution. It was well attended by faculty, students, as well as several external visitors, since it was a hybrid event, publicly advertised. Plenty of time was allowed for discussions and demonstrations afterwards.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
 
Description Lohengrin Time Machine design workshop 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Local
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The Unlocking Musicology team hosted a half-day workshop in November 2018 with our collaborator and Wagner expert, Prof. Laurence Dreyfus, and Will Elsom from the Peroshi web design and development team. Taking both through the technical accordances of MELD, we then identified the requirements and foundations for the professional design work required to realise the Lohengrin Time Machine app.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
 
Description Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion at DMRN+14 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact We demonstrated the Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion, alongside an explanatory poster, to attendees at the Digital Music Research Network event on 17th December 2010, held at Queen Mary University of London.

The Digital Companion was created by the Unlocking Musicology project (AH/R004803/1) and is built upon the MELD framework developed by the Oxford team as part of the FAST project (EP/L019981/1).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion at ISMIR 2019 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact We demonstrated the Lohengrin TimeMachine Digital Companion, alongside an explanatory poster, to attendees at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval conference on the 8th November 2019, held at Delft University, The Netherlands. The Digital Companion was created by the Unlocking Musicology project (AH/R004803/1) and is built upon the MELD framework developed by the Oxford team as part of the FAST project (EP/L019981/1).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description MEI Developers' Workshop (Vienna) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Annual workshop for the development of the Music Encoding Initiative standard or tools relating to it. Over the course of the workshop, we extended the standard for the encoding of tablature notations, particularly German lute tablature, made improvements to the online documentation, and began the development of a test suite for an MEI editor.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2024
URL https://iwk.mdw.ac.at/mei-development-workshop/
 
Description MEI Linked Data Interest Group 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact The Interest Group considers applications of Linked Data to interconnect the rich music and music-related information resources available on the Web with MEI encodings. It focuses on establishing and documenting best practices through community discussion, work on the MEI guidelines for this topic, and proposing useful changes to the MEI schema to enhance or facilitate such connections to and from MEI encodings. The group seeks to provide reference points, both for newcomers, and those with more advanced experience in the topic. Finally, the group intends to work to raise awareness of Linked Data practices within the MEI community, and of music-specific approaches within the Semantic Web and Web science communities.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020,2021,2022,2023
URL https://music-encoding.org/community/interest-groups
 
Description Meeting with the New York Philharmonic Digital Archives team 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact As part of our collaboration with the New York Philharmonic, in June 2018 the Unlocking Musicology team met with the orchestra's Digital Archive team in New York. We demonstrated our MELD semantic annotation technology, and identified materials from the Archive which could be developed into a demonstrable MELD 'app'.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
 
Description Member and co-chair of Special Interest Group on tablature notation for the Music Encoding Initiative 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Membership of a SIG for the standards body the Music Encoding Initiative aiming to develop and extend support for tablature notations (including guitar tabs and historical lute tablature). This includes adding this notation to music typesetting tools.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020,2021,2022,2023,2024
URL https://music-encoding.org/community/interest-groups.html
 
Description Member of Special Interest Group on MerMEId for the Music Encoding Initiative 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Membership of a SIG for the standards body the Music Encoding Initiative. This SIG is for developers (and, to a lesser extent, users) of a musical works cataloguing tool, MerMEId, built with the standard, and focusses on planning, documentation and bug fixes.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020,2021,2022,2023,2024
URL https://github.com/Edirom/MerMEId/
 
Description Member of Special Interest Group on mensural notation for the Music Encoding Initiative 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Membership of (and at times co-chairing) a SIG for the standards body the Music Encoding Initiative on pre-1600 music notation.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019,2020,2021,2022,2023,2024
URL https://music-encoding.org/
 
Description Music Laboratory at the University of Haifa 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Undergraduate students
Results and Impact David Lewis was invited to provide advice and supervision to undergraduate and postgraduate students in the 'Music Laboratory' programme at the university - an innovative, team-based project connecting students in music, computing and robotics. He also gave an open lecture at the institution as part of the visit.
Visit dates: May 2018, June 2019
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018,2019
URL https://sites.hevra.haifa.ac.il/rbd/category/music/?lang=en
 
Description Narratives through Data showcase 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Public/other audiences
Results and Impact The Unlocking Musicology project held an evening showcase event on 24th July 2019 on "Narratives through Data" at Keble College, Oxford. The event was open and advertised to the general public; all 80 available registrations sold out; attendees included local members of the Oxford general public, alongside national and international visitors attending other events. The event was organised and staffed by Kevin Page (Unlocking Musicology, FAST) and David Lewis (Unlocking Musicology).

After a scene setting presentation in the main auditorium, attendees were able to interact with hands on demonstrations allowing them to explore the notion of narratives through data. This was illustrated through the collaborations with Unlocking Musicology partners - the Internet Archive Live Music Archive, RILM, the New York Philharmonic, and Prof. Laurence Dreyfus's Lohengrin Time Machine - alongside an exemplar from the Digital Delius project using British Library collections, and technologies from the FAST project.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://um.web.ox.ac.uk/event
 
Description New York Philharmonic Digital Archives, June 2019 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Concluding our collaboration with the New York Philharmonic, the Unlocking Musicology team visited the archive team in New York in June 2019 to present the 'Listening through Time' interactive demonstrator, utilising data from the NY Phil digital archives. We also demonstrated and discussed our other project outputs; and the NY Phil archives reported interest in further exploration of potential use of innovative digital tools and methods in the future.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Participation in research network - Digital directions for collected editions (AH/V015095/1 ) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact Regular 'seminars' for a UKRI-funded network (AH/V015095/1), gathering scholars and music editors to consider the future of collected music editions. Participation in final conference in March 2023.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2022,2023
 
Description Poster and demonstration at Digital Humanities 2020 conference 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact David Lewis and Kevin Page presented a demonstration of 'An interactive multimedia companion to Wagner's Lohengrin: encoding and visualising a motivic study', one of the proof-of-concept demonstrators developed during the Unlocking Musicology project. During the virtual conference, the research team responded to questions from the audience.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020
URL https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:31989/
 
Description Presentation at Music//Media//History conference at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, 14-17th March 2019 (Kevin Page) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Kevin Page presented an invited paper on "Musically-meaningful annotations of audio-visual material" at the Music//Media//History conference at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna on the subject of "Re-Thinking Musicology in an Age of Digital Media". The presentation described the Oxford e-Research Centre team's application of semantic annotation technology to three different areas of musicology: composition of new works, the study of performance and rehearsal by musicians, and the digital encoding of evidence and argument in the scholarly discussion of music.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://www.mdw.ac.at/upload/MDWeb/iatgm/downloads/MUSIC-MEDIA_HISTORY_TellingSounds_Programm.pdf
 
Description Presentation at the 2019 Congress of the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres (IAML), 14-19th July 2019, Kraków, Poland 
Form Of Engagement Activity A talk or presentation
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Kevin Page and David Lewis presented "Enhancing musicological articles with multimedia and interaction using Linked Data and the Music Encoding Initiative" to an international audience of professional music librarians and archivists.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description Programme Chair of Music Encoding Conference 2019, 29th May to 1st June 2019, University of Vienna, Austria (Kevin Page) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact The Music Encoding Conference is the key annual event for dissemination and discussion for those working with, and on, music encoding. In 2019 the conference received 51 submissions from authors across the globe, with a programme of 16 accepted papers, 18 posters, 1 panel, and 5 workshops given to an audience of 102 international registrations.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://music-encoding.org/conference/2019/
 
Description RISM UK workshop: Crowdsourcing musical data 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach National
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Kevin Page attended and contributed to a workshop on the replacement for the RISM databasewith a tailored UK discovery layer for the worldwide RISM database. The workshop examined how users might engage with the RISM database and its data, and whether crowd-sourcing could be used as a technique, for instance to get users to add coded incipits to the current entries in the RISM database.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2020
 
Description Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) workshop 2018 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact As part of our collaboration with RILM the Unlocking Musicology team visited RILM headquarters in New York for four days in June 2018. During this time the RILM and Unlocking Musicology teams worked together to identify where semantic technologies developed at Oxford could be helpfully applied to the RILM bibliography data, and set an implementation plan for realising this over the subsequent year.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
 
Description Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) workshop, April 2019 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact As part of our collaboration with RILM the Unlocking Musicology team visited RILM headquarters in New York for two days in April 2019. During this time the RILM and Unlocking Musicology teams worked together to complete installation, data ingestion, and testing of the Semantic Alignment and Linked Tool (SALT) with RILM bibliographic data.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://um.web.ox.ac.uk/rilm
 
Description Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM), June 2019 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact Concluding our collaboration with RILM, the Unlocking Musicology team visited RILM headquarters in New York in June 2019 to present visualisations or RILM bibliographic data, and results of using the Semantic Alignment and Linked Tool (SALT).
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
 
Description The Delius String Quartet: Editing for Performance 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach Regional
Primary Audience Undergraduate students
Results and Impact Led by the Villiers Quartet and Prof. Daniel Grimley, a public masterclass coached a student string quartet through the performing challenges posed by the original, unpublished version of Delius's String Quartet. In addition to questions of interpretation, the workshop looked at problems of playability when bringing works to performance from manuscript. A collaboration with the Digital Delius project at Oxford, the masterclass used an enhanced MELD annotation tool, developed through Unlocking Musicology, to help participants interact with the score and create a digital record of the masterclass.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2018
URL https://www.music.ox.ac.uk/event/the-delius-string-quartet-editing-for-performance/
 
Description Working Group member EarlyMuse European COST action (CA21161) 
Form Of Engagement Activity A formal working group, expert panel or dialogue
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Industry/Business
Results and Impact EarlyMuse is a consortium which brings together academic partners from many countries, with a network of music culture professionals and industry partner. EarlyMuse intends to find paths to strengthen the unique place of early music in Europe, in our intellectual and cultural practices, and in global appeal. EarlyMuse addresses six challenges: (1) scientific, (2) educational, (3) professional, (4) structural, (5) economic and (6) societal. The project will transform the scientific field, redraw the place of early music in higher education, attract original talent, deploy tools useful to emerging creative industries, and define public policy in the field of culture
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023,2024
URL https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA21161/
 
Description Workshops co-chair of ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, June 2019 (Kevin Page) 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Postgraduate students
Results and Impact Kevin Page was invited to be co-chair of the workshops and tutorials programme for the ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL) 2019, held at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, in June 2019. The conference is a key annual event for the digital libraries community; 4 workshops and and 5 tutorials were accepted and co-ordinated after review.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2019
URL https://2019.jcdl.org/