MCMA: A Symbolic Multitrack Contrapuntal Music Archive

We present Multitrack Contrapuntal Music Archive (MCMA, available at https://mcma.readthedocs.io), a symbolic dataset of pieces specifically curated to comprise, for any given polyphonic work, independent voices. So far, MCMA consists only of pieces from the Baroque repertoire but we aim to extend it to other contrapuntal music. MCMA is FAIR-compliant and it is geared towards musicological tasks such as (computational) analysis or education, as it brings to the fore contrapuntal interactions by explicit and independent representation. Furthermore, it affords for a more apt usage of recent advances in the field of natural language processing (e.g., neural machine translation). For example, MCMA can be particularly useful in the context of language-based machine learning models for music generation. Despite its current modest size, we believe MCMA to be an important addition to online contrapuntal music databases, and we thus open it to contributions from the wider community, in the hope that MCMA can continue to grow beyond our efforts. In this article, we provide the rationale for this corpus, suggest possible use cases, offer an overview of the compiling process (data sourcing and processing), and present a brief statistical analysis of the corpus at the time of writing. Finally, future work that we endeavor to undertake is discussed.

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text (RAFT) is published by RILM, an internationally recognized authority on providing bibliographic access to music research. The database includes over a million bibliographic records with coverage from the early 1800's to the present. Full text coverage of more than 250 journals provides additional value to this database. The full text titles are unique to the database and there is very little overlap with other music databases. The comprehensives and quality of RILM Abstracts of Music Literature with Full Text is unrivaled among music databases.The EBSCO interface of RAFT is familiar to many users and offers easy integration with other heavily used music databases, such as Music Index with Full Text and RIPM Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals. The heavy coverage of foreign language content and sheer size of the citations may make RAF intimidating to the novice music researcher. However, RILM's authority on music research and interdisciplinary content make RAFT a necessary database for serious upper-level music research.

Music Index with Full Text

Music Index with Full Text is an expansion of Music Index (formerly The Music Index Online), an EBSCO music periodical database that provides comprehensive coverage of the music field from 1970 to the present. Over 800 journals are indexed, and coverage includes various music styles and topics. Music Index with Full Text has added full text journal coverage from approximately 200 journals.The EBSCO interface is familiar to many users and offers easy integration with other heavily used music databases, such as RILM and RIPM. While the sheer size of citations and variety of music materials and styles is beneficial, Music Index might not be as useful to researchers focusing purely on historical music scholarship. The addition of full text journals is welcome, but the content of the journals varies widely in scope and content.

Automatic Staff Reconstruction within SIMSSA Project

The automatic analysis of scores has been a research topic of interest for the last few decades and still is since music databases that include musical scores are currently being created to make musical content available to the public, including scores of ancient music. For the correct analysis of music elements and their interpretation, the identification of staff lines is of key importance. In this paper, a scheme to post-process the output of a previous musical object identification system is described. This system allows the reconstruction by means of detection, tracking and interpolation of the staff lines of ancient scores from the digital Salzinnes Database. The scheme developed shows a remarkable performance on the specific task it was created for.

Genre of Bangla Music: A Machine Classification Learning Approach

The necessity for designing autonomous indexing tools to establish expressive and efficient means of describing musical media content is well recognized. Music genre classification systems are significant to manage and use music databases. This research paper proposes an enhanced method to automatically classify music into different genre using a machine learning approach and presents the insight and results of the application of the proposed scheme to the classification of a large set of The Bangla music content, a South-East Asian language rich with a variety of music genres developed over many centuries. Building upon musical feature extraction and decision-making techniques, we propose new features and procedures to achieve enhanced accuracy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method by extracting features from a dataset of hundreds of The Bangla music pieces and testing the automatic classification decisions. This is the first development of an automated classification technique applied specifically to the Bangla music to the best of our knowledge, while the superior accuracy of the method makes it universally applicable.

Mokranjac on repeat: Reaffirming musical canon through sound recordings (PGP-RTB/RTS discography)

Starting with the hypothesis that sound recordings published by the Serbian/ Yugoslav record label PGP-RTB/RTS dominated programmes of the Radio Television Belgrade/Radio Television Serbia during most of the twentieth century (while declining in this century), and that decisions made within the label on which composers? works were going to be (repeatedly) present in its catalogue consequently had significant impact on overall music and media culture in Serbia/Yugoslavia, our goal was to examine how the central composer figure of Serbian music, Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac, was represented in this catalogue. Research methods were based primarily on analysis of archive material gathered in documentation of the label itself, data on recordings available via online music databases, and recordings themselves, while relying on theoretical notions of canon in music, with the accent on the performing canon.

From Music to Big Music: Listening in the Age of Big Data

Following a series of technological breakthroughs and the proliferation of new, cloud-based media, listening in the 21st century has become dynamic, fragmented, interactive and distributed. Contemporary audiences are typically expected to traverse (big) music databases and, employing several overlapping interfaces, to resynthesize, rather than to merely access, content. On this construal, new ways of both experiencing and thinking about music have been laid out. This article attempts to sketch the “big music” phenomenon, discussing its genesis, outlining its implications and, finally, suggesting a typology for the classification of its carrier media.

A roadshow of library resources: familiarize students with what you have

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe how the popular culture of flash mob inspired the creation of the library roadshows and elaborate on the conducting of flash outreach events to market music databases to students with limited resources. Design/methodology/approach – By not requesting faculty for in-class teaching time, the promotion of library e-resources took place beyond the library building, in places where students live and hangout, and during the short window when students mingle before classes. Simple set-up with laptops and a movable large screen TV was used for brief database demonstration. Findings – The provision of quick demos and on-the-go consultations of e-resources through the library roadshows proved to encourage usage and obtain a higher return on investment without requiring much extra manpower and funding. Students also welcomed this new way of learning without having to go to a class. Social implications – Seeing students and offering services where students live and hangout help make the library more visible and blend librarians in students’ campus life. Originality/value – While information literacy workshops oftentimes happen inside the library or during a class hour, the library roadshows go beyond physical boundaries and take information literacy instruction to where the targeted audience is. Not only are these flash outreach events quick and easy to conduct, but this casual learning also fits the learning behavior of the millennial generation who wants everything succinct and straight to the point.