The Tunes & Tales project hosted the third edition of the International Workshop on Folk Music Analysis at the Meertens Institute in the beginning of June. The workshop focussed on the question how current developments in knowledge engineering and information retrieval can help to understand music from different cultural backgrounds.
The workshop was very successful in bringing together researchers from different backgrounds, ranging from musicology to engineering and computer science. We welcomed nearly 50 participants from all over Europe and beyond.
The program included 14 talks and 14 posters all of which showed an interest in employing computational methods for the analysis or understanding of music.
On Thursday afternoon, Emilia Gómez from the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona gave a keynote talk on Computer-Assisted Transcription and Description of Music Recordings. This was combined with the regular eHumanities research meeting, so that researchers from other fields of Computational Humanities research also attended.
On Friday afternoon, a panel session on transcription continued the questions raised by Emilia’s presentation, namely in how far computer transcription can help us to understand music from different cultural backgrounds. The panel was moderated by Ashley Burgoyne (Amsterdam Univeristy). The panelists were Kofi Agawu (Princeton University), Dániel P. Biró (University of Victoria), Olmo Cornelis (University College Ghent, Belgium), Emilia Gómez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), and Barbara Titus (Utrecht University). The panelists have different backgrounds in music research, as some use computational aids for music transcription and analysis, while others rely on traditional methods, or on a combination of approaches. The discussion showed that computational methods and tools cannot exist independently from musicological research topics and questions to be supportive in musicological research.
The workshop ended with a performance by Naomi Sato on sho, and Harrie Starreveld on shakuhachi. They played traditional Japanese compositions for these instruments, and musically concluded two successful days of discourse on music analysis.
More details can be found on the website of the workshop:
http://www.elab-oralculture.nl/fma2013/
The talks are available on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9qy3wyBXU4PJnIsPQF5udzPebo7H_O3j
The proceedings are available online:
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/math/2013-0604-200726/UUindex.html