Beyond the score: Music visualization and digital humanities

Abstract

Margaret Lam investigates challenges related to the transmission, preservation and organization of music knowledge. She works independently as a researcher, writer and designer as well as a collaborator on various projects. You can learn more about her work at www.margism.com. M usic -beyond the scores, recordings and signal analysis that occupies information scientists and music librarians -has the amazing ability to bring human history to life. The ethos of a time and place is inevitably reflected by the humanities, and music is no exception. We know this effect through our own personal experiences: the way couples have their song, the way music takes you back to a time in a different place, the soundtrack of car radios, movies and television shows that accompany us through various life stages. For many music scholars the socio-cultural aspect of music is an important part of their research. However, current conceptualization of music research within digital humanities does not fully address the socio-cultural element in music research. Efforts within the digital humanities are focused primarily on music as either information or artifact. While the elements of music such as pitch and rhythm are common to all music researchers to various degrees, it is not fully representative of the diverse approaches that music research can take [1]. Conceptualization of what constitutes music within digital humanities is necessarily narrow as we experiment with different applications of technologies to support music research. Yet, as I will suggest in this short piece, a broader conceptualization of music is necessary for digital humanities research in the domain of music to have real impact on music scholarship. Music as Information, Music as KnowledgeWhen we conceptualize music as information, we are referring to elements of music such as pitches, chords, tempo and dynamics on one level, and contextual information such as genres, performers, dates and instrumentation on another. The development of specialized markup languages for music (see www.recodare.com/musicxml) and the largest hub for music information EDITOR'S SUMMARY Among the humanities, music is especially powerful for reflecting time and place and evoking personal experiences and memories. Yet music research in the digital humanities has attended little to socio-cultural context, tradition, history and performance knowledge, instead focusing on the musical score and technical elements. To have an impact on music scholarship, digital research in the music domain must be considered more broadly. An example is the work of Alexander Chan, whose cutting edge music research may be appreciated as interactive installations but gets little recognition within digital humanities. Music research has fallen short in its use of digital technology to understand theory, composition, musicology and the preservation and transmission of music knowledge. Despite music's evocative power, its conceptual scope in digital research is narrow.

A Survey on Visualizations for Musical Data

“…Probably anyone has personal experiences with music, a medium that has the unique feature to unite people. This sociocultural aspect of music is one of the main driving forces for music research [Lam12]. Merriam‐Webster defines musicology as ‘the study of music as a branch of knowledge or field of research as distinct from composition or performance' [MW18].…”

“…Similar to other subdomains of the humanities, in recent years, digital methods became increasingly important in musicology to store, structure and analyse vast amounts of digitally available musicological data [Urb17]. To achieve these tasks, visualization is a key element in this context, as it enables easier access to the data and has the capability to highlight relationships between structural elements of music [Lam12]. As the data to be observed are manifold, visualization designs offered to analyse data occur in many different forms.…”