Stay True to the Sound of History: Philology, Phylogenetics and Information Engineering in Musicology

Abstract

This work investigates computational musicology for the study of tape music works tackling the problems concerning stemmatics. These philological problems have been analyzed with an innovative approach considering the peculiarities of audio tape recordings. The paper presents a phylogenetic reconstruction strategy that relies on digitizing the analyzed tapes and then converting each audio track into a two-dimensional spectrogram. This conversion allows adopting a set of computer vision tools to align and equalize different tracks in order to infer the most likely transformation that converts one track into another. In the presented approach, the main editing techniques, intentional and unintentional alterations and different configurations of a tape recorded are estimated in phylogeny analysis. The proposed solution presents a satisfying robustness to the adoption of the wrong reading setup together with a good reconstruction accuracy of the phylogenetic tree. The reconstructed dependencies proved to be correct or plausible in 90% of the experimental cases.

The Magnetic Urtext: Restoration as Music Interpretation

“…Audio philology, specifically in the field of tape music, needs specially designed and developed software. Frameworks such as CAP, combined with algorithms capable of interpreting multichannel acoustic information ( Salvati and Canazza, 2014 ) and phylogenetic techniques ( Verde et al, 2018 ) will enable a process of preservation of the work and its reactivations, taking into account of the interpretative possibilities in its technological and physical-acoustic aspects.…”

“…The 30-year experience that the authors have gained in the field of audio philology has resulted in the development of software CAP (Computer Aided audio Philology) that supports researchers in the processes of recensio , collatio , eliminatio, codicum descriptorum , and stemma codicum ( West, 1973 ; Verde et al, 2018 ) (see main interface in Supplementary Figure 2 ). An operator inserts all the data, metadata, and contextual information in CAP, which creates the final critical edition of the musical work.…”

A multilevel dynamic model for documenting, reactivating and preserving interactive multimedia art

“…In this scenario, it is important to adopt new strategies for preserving contemporary art that specifically take into account the technological, multimedia, and the mutable nature of the artwork, as well as the role of the audience and the interactive experience. Strategies for preserving and digitizing video, film, photos and audio (Salvati and Canazza, 2014;Bressan et al, 2016;Verde et al, 2018) as well as hardware and software components should converge in a unique preservation model with the aim of preserving and reactivating the artwork.…”