Text mining and early music: using Lexomics in research

Cook, Karen M.

doi:10.1093/em/cav085

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Yet this enterprise is worth pursuing, if only to illustrate the possibilities of the approach, one which Howe and Windram ( 2011 ) term “phylomemetics”, the cultural equivalent of phylogenetics. As they acknowledge (Howe and Windram, 2011 , p. 1), this is by no means a new methodology in the humanities, where philologists in both linguistic and musical research have long attempted to reconstruct stemmata showing relationships of transmission and mutation in sources as diverse as biblical texts and medieval music manuscripts (Cook, 2015 ). Conducted under (or, some might fear, annexed by) the rubric of phylomemetics, such research can incorporate all the intellectual infrastructure of Darwinism—the notions of variation, replication and selection; concepts of fitness; and ideas of lineage bifurcation and divergence—in tracing connections between the phenomena under investigation 26 .…”

Section: Phylomemetics and Cultural Taxonomiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Two Brothers”: Reconciling Perceptual-Cognitive and Statistical Models of Musical Evolution

Jan

2018

Front. Psychol.

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While the “units, events and dynamics” of memetic evolution have been abstractly theorized (Lynch, 1998), they have not been applied systematically to real corpora in music. Some researchers, convinced of the validity of cultural evolution in more than the metaphorical sense adopted by much musicology, but perhaps skeptical of some or all of the claims of memetics, have attempted statistically based corpus-analysis techniques of music drawn from molecular biology, and these have offered strong evidence in favor of system-level change over time (Savage, 2017). This article argues that such statistical approaches, while illuminating, ignore the psychological realities of music-information grouping, the transmission of such groups with varying degrees of fidelity, their selection according to relative perceptual-cognitive salience, and the power of this Darwinian process to drive the systemic changes (such as the development over time of systems of tonal organization in music) that statistical methodologies measure. It asserts that a synthesis between such statistical approaches to the study of music-cultural change and the theory of memetics as applied to music (Jan, 2007), in particular the latter's perceptual-cognitive elements, would harness the strengths of each approach and deepen understanding of cultural evolution in music.

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Section: Phylomemetics and Cultural Taxonomiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The Two Brothers”: Reconciling Perceptual-Cognitive and Statistical Models of Musical Evolution

Jan

2018

Front. Psychol.

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Old, New, and Newer Still in Book 7 of the Speculum musice

Zayaruznaya¹

2020

Journal of the American Musicological Society

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In chapter 27 of the last book of his Speculum musice, Jacobus faults an unnamed theorist for misattributing some ars nova doctrine to the ars antiqua; he then excuses the offense by explaining that the oldest ars nova theory might already seem old to current practitioners. This passage and several others suggest that Jacobus was writing at a time when the ars nova was hardly new. And yet the earliest ars nova theory dates from 1319, while the completion of the Speculum musice is often placed in the mid-1320s or ca. 1330. Since the Speculum cites a range of ars nova treatises that in turn cite a repertoire of motets, Jacobus's comments serve as a terminus ante quem for the ars nova writ large. This study reconsiders the date of completion for the last, seventh book of the Speculum musice. It is clear that Jacobus was older than the moderni and finished his treatise as an old man, but he also reveals that he wrote over a long span of time and revised his work repeatedly. His notational proclivities are those of a musician who came of age in a post-Franconian idiom prevalent until ca. 1320, but the latest notational developments he mentions include semiminims, dragmas, and even note shapes otherwise associated with the so-called ars subtilior. In light of this, I suggest that the Speculum musice could have been finished as late as the 1350s by an author in his mid- to late seventies. This redating, in turn, invites broad reconsideration of the transition between ars antiqua and ars nova.

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Text mining and early music: using Lexomics in research

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

“The Two Brothers”: Reconciling Perceptual-Cognitive and Statistical Models of Musical Evolution

“The Two Brothers”: Reconciling Perceptual-Cognitive and Statistical Models of Musical Evolution

Old, New, and Newer Still in Book 7 of the Speculum musice

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