Unlocking Musicology: Digital Engagement for Digital Research

'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.

'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.