Schubert Winterreise Dataset

This article presents a multimodal dataset comprising various representations and annotations of Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise . Schubert’s seminal work constitutes an outstanding example of the Romantic song cycle—a central genre within Western classical music. Our dataset unifies several public sources and annotations carefully created by music experts, compiled in a comprehensive and consistent way. The multimodal representations comprise the singer’s lyrics, sheet music in different machine-readable formats, and audio recordings of nine performances, two of which are freely accessible for research purposes. By means of explicit musical measure positions, we establish a temporal alignment between the different representations, thus enabling a detailed comparison across different performances and modalities. Using these alignments, we provide for the different versions various musicological annotations describing tonal and structural characteristics. This metadata comprises chord annotations in different granularities, local and global annotations of musical keys, and segmentations into structural parts. From a technical perspective, the dataset allows for evaluating algorithmic approaches to tasks such as automated music transcription, cross-modal music alignment, or tonal analysis, and for testing these algorithms’ robustness across songs, performances, and modalities. From a musicological perspective, the dataset enables the systematic study of Schubert’s musical language and style in Winterreise and the comparison of annotations regarding different annotators and granularities. Beyond the research domain, the data may serve further purposes such as the didactic preparation of Schubert’s work and its presentation to a wider public by means of an interactive multimedia experience. With this article, we provide a detailed description of the dataset, indicate its potential for computational music analysis by means of several studies, and point out possibilities for future research.

Ornamentation as Gesture in Atonal Music

Hearing and representing melodic and harmonic elaboration lies at the heart of tonal analysis. We sometimes disagree about what exactly is ornamental or how tones are prolonged, but our widespread collective understanding of passing tones, neighbor tones, suspensions, and the like underscores the important notion that some notes are more structurally important than others. This article proposes ways to read ornamentation in atonal music, recasting ornamental categories gesturally and pragmatically instead of (or in addition to) tonally and metrically.

Assessing the current state of information security policies in academic organizations

Purpose Colleges and universities across the USA have seen data breaches and intellectual property theft rise at a heightened rate over the past several years. An integral step in the first line of defense against various forms of attacks are (written) security policies designed to prescribe the construction and function of a technical system, while simultaneously guiding the actions of individuals operating within said system. Unfortunately, policy analysis is an insufficiently discussed topic in many academic communities with very little research being conducted in this space. Design/methodology/approach This work aims to assess the current state of information security policies by analyzing in-use policies from 200 universities and colleges in the USA with the goal of identifying important features and general attributes of these documents. The authors accomplish this through a series of analyzes designed to examine the language and construction of these policies. Findings To summarize high-level results, the authors found that only 54 per cent of the top 200 universities had publicly accessible information security policies, and the policies that were examined lacked consistency with little shared source material. The authors also found that the tonal makeup of these policies lacked a great deal of emotion, but contained a high amount of tentative or ambiguous language leading toward policies that could be viewed as “unclear.” Originality/value This work is an extension of a paper that was presented at ECIS 2018. The authors have added additional analyzes including a cross-policy content and tonal analysis to strengthen the findings and implications of this work for the wider research audience.

Contrastive foot structure in Franconian tone-accent dialects

Franconian has a contrast between two tone accents, commonly referred to as Accent 1 and Accent 2. Traditional autosegmental analyses of the phenomenon suggest that this opposition derives from the presence of lexical tone. In contrast to this ‘tonal approach’, I argue that the Franconian accent contrast is based on contrastive foot structure – there is no tone in the lexicon. This ‘metrical approach’ not only accounts for the tonal differences between the accents, but also captures a variety of facts that are hard to incorporate into a synchronic tonal analysis, involving morphological alternations between Accent 1 and Accent 2, as well as the effects of vowel duration, vowel quality and consonant quality on accent-class membership. The metrical analysis of these patterns is in line with similar approaches to tone-accent contrasts in North Germanic and Scottish Gaelic.