My blog often contains posts about things that I'm currently thinking about or working on.
In July 2008 I won a Ph.D studentship at Goldsmiths working on a project called Purcell Plus. Essentially, the project aims to examine the current state of the art of computational musicology and to try to assess what it may have to offer conventional musicologists. It will do this by applying the tools common in computational musicology to a small but comprehensive corpus consisting of the Fantasias and In Nomines of Henry Purcell, and incorporating not just score data, but also the various manuscript sources, recordings, and contemporary and contemporaneous textual commentaries.
The project is funded by the AHRC, JISC, and the EPSRC as part of their Arts and Humanities eScience Initiative. The Ph.D is funded as part of the same initiative for four years from October 2008.
Lewis, Richard J. (2008) Digital Music Encoding as Cultural Practice. MMus thesis, University of East Anglia, Norwich.
We examine the use of computers in storing and manipulating music. We consider the validity of treating music as information in the formal terms required by computers. We take the metaphor of inscriptions (marks on a medium) and draw out its implications for music representation techniques and digital encoding practices through its relationship to notations and to digital storage, its ability to take on semantics and become a representation, its ability to be gathered together into documents, and its ability to be disseminated, particularly over digital networks. We then examine some examples of practice in designing and applying digital music encoding methods and draw some conclusions for the practice of computer assisted musicology: that suitable encoding methods are vital for any application of computers in music research, and that users must understand how musical information is being represented in order to make optimal use of the techniques.
A PDF copy of the thesis is available here.
Here is the original research proposal for my Masters thesis.
I bring to my work a particular conjunction of skills: formal training in musicology and interest and experience in computing. My undergraduate studies in music focused mainly on music analysis and on the context and mechanics of medieval liturgical music. At the same time my keen interest in computing was developed through an application of computational techniques to music analysis and, immediately following my degree, work on a Web-delivered archive of electroacoustic music. I have developed a good grasp of the process of abstracting real-world phenomena into computational structures and have been able to apply this knowledge to specifically musical phenomena.
I began my Master's degree with a view to researching the possibility of computational music analysis which quickly lead to exploration of music encoding - ways of expressing musical information to computers. I worked on a taxonomy of music encoding methods consisting of two broad categories: audio and symbolic. The later I further divided into cognitive, textual, and sociological (or gestural) models.
I have drawn a number of conclusions from this work which I intend to develop in my doctoral research, including epistemological issues around the conjunctures and disjunctures of musical and computational knowledge. These are focused on the reducibility of musical elements to the level of precision and clarity required by computers and on which elements suit this reduction process. It is also necessary to investigate the proposing, implementing and using of music encoding methods as a contemporary cultural practice. Although a lot of objective work has been accomplished, very little has been said about the practitioners, their motivations and processes and the discrepancies or correlations between intentions and results. A consolidation of the epistemological principles will provide a necessary basis for this anthropological study.
This project does not attempt to continue any objective evaluation of existing music encoding methods' relative merits as an end in itself, nor to propose any further encoding methods which attempt to surpass or unify existing methods.
The present proposal, rather, is to deconstruct the large body of pre-existing work in music encoding and treat it as a practice much like musical performance, or the science studies view of scientific practice. This work may require current practitioners and projects in the field to re-evaluate their work and may also serve to deepen the understanding of textual music and the role of computing in the humanities and in culture.
I have been involved with two instances of this practice at UEA: the AHRB funded Sonic Arts Research Archive (http://www.sara.uea.ac.uk/) and CURSUS (a corpus of medieval liturgical texts transcribed for use on the Web; http://www.cursus.uea.ac.uk/) projects. I intend to use my knowledge and experience of the work and methods of these projects as evidence and testing grounds for my research.
I see potential career paths both within universities but also in consultancy in the dissemination of cultural objects in digital forms.
These are some of my older thoughts on my research work:
This work seems to be following two strands: principles and practice. The principles are centred around the idea of musical epistemology, digital epistemology and their relationship, in an almost structuralist manner. What is the nature of musical knowledge? What can we know about an instance of musical practice? Or of musical text? Are there longevous intentions embedded in musical artefacts? Can musical information be reduced to discrete - or digital - components and consequently be equated to or expressed as digital knowledge? And what is the nature of digital knowledge? What kinds of knowledge do computers afford, when stripped of anthropomorphic tendencies such as artificial intelligence or desktop abstractions and treated in a more paradigmatic manner? What is the difference between computational understanding and human understanding? And what consequences may the relationship have for music perception and representation?
While the pratice is based on the process of computer modelling. What do the heuristics of modelling teach the modeller about the modelled artefact? What methods would suit the modelling of music information in computers? Are there, and could there be, standards of music representation? Are there alternatives to the existing music representation methods - digital audio data and textual encodings of musical scores? What practical applications can digital representations of music be put to? Such as archiving, computer performance, music typesetting and music information retrieval. These ideas are then related to the epistemological questions by asking what is the status of the model? How far does the model represent the modelled? Which is more real? How long is the referential chain which links the model to the modelled? And what exactly is being modelled? Music as a textual phenomenon lends itself to a variety of modelling methods but then what is the status of the initial textual object? How does this affect the referential chain?