Interweaving and Enriching Digital Music Collections for Scholarship, Performance, and Enjoyment

Abstract

The turn toward the digital has opened up previously difficult to access musical materials to wider musicological scholarship. Digital repositories provide access to publicly licensed score images, score encodings, textual resources, audiovisual recordings, and music metadata. While each repository reveals rich information for scholarly investigation, the unified exploration and analysis of separate digital collections remains a challenge. TROMPA-Towards Richer Online Music Public-domain Archives-addresses this through a knowledge graph interweaving composers, performers, and works described in established digital music libraries, facilitating discovery and combined access of complementary materials across collections. TROMPA provides for contribution of expert insights as citable, provenanced annotations, supporting analytical workflows and scholarly communication. Beyond scholars, the project targets four further user types: instrumental players; choir singers; orchestras; and music enthusiasts; with corresponding web applications providing specialised views of the same underlying knowledge graph. Thus, scholars' annotations provide contextual information to other types of users; while performers' rehearsal recordings and performative annotations, conductors' marked up scores, and enthusiasts' social discussions and listening behaviours, become available to scholarly analysis (per user consent). The knowledge graph is exposed as Linked Data, adhering to the FAIR principles of making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable, and supporting further interlinking, re-interpretation and re-use beyond the immediate scope of the project. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored.

Read/Write Digital Libraries for Musicology

“…Modern Web (re-)decentralisation projects such as Solid are working toward more equitable processes of information exchange. TROMPA's use cases [16] outline a spectrum of demands regarding contribution, access, and governance of user data. This provides a fruitful setting to consider not just architectural concerns, but also the user-facing reception and implications of such solutions to a varied selection of audiences, including those with limited technical expertise; and corresponding challenges of eliciting and incentivising contributions, and providing for their reuse in different contexts, potentially beyond those foreseen within project scope.…”

“…TROMPA [16] is a project to interconnect public-domain music resources published in repositories on the Web, and to enrich these resources using machine processes and user contributions. Within this project we have implemented prototypical applications for two use-cases-respectively focusing on annotation of scores and audio recordings, and on the analysis and review of rehearsal attemptsthat together serve to demonstrate the feasibility of the ideas presented in this paper.…”

Emotion Annotation of Music: A Citizen Science Approach

“…To implement R6, the data infrastructure of the ME platform is centered around the TROMPA Contributor Environment (CE), which is a web-based platform that interlinks items hosted within different music repositories. The CE is implemented as a graph database that does not incorporate the content itself, but it refers to content hosted in web-accessible public repositories using URIs [32]. Thus, the annotations generated through the ME are stored following the Web Annotation Data Model 4 as generic core representation, which enables annotations to be shared and reused across different hardware and software platforms.…”

Using Note-Level Music Encodings to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research on Human Engagement with Music

“…An exception is Fields et al 2011, who explored integrating human annotations of musical form into a linkeddata framework, and more recent work has begun to incorporate note-level encodings into these frameworks, facilitating content-based search and indexing. An example of this is the Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework (Weigl and Page, 2017;De Roure et al, 2018;Lewis et al, 2018;Page et al, 2019), which uses MEI encoding and is integrated into the large-scale Towards Richer Online Music Public-domain Archives (TROMPA) (Weigl et al, 2019a) project. The work by Meroño-Peñuela et al 2018integrating MIDI encodings within a linkeddata framework also provides the opportunity for linking data to musical elements.…”

“…Thus, research into these types of questions does not yield integrative theories about how humans engage with music or produce data that can be used to work towards such theories. Some promising work in this direction is being done in the Towards Richer Online Music Public-domain Archives (TROMPA) project (Weigl et al, 2019a), but there remains a wealth of carefully curated research data that is not being utilized to its fullest potential.…”