David M. Weigl

Music and Science: Parallels in Production

The music industry has embraced digital technology, from recording and production of music through to distribution and consumption. Meanwhile scholarly communication, including academic publishing and libraries, is also undergoing transformation thanks to the affordances of the digital. We suggest that comparing and contrasting these two sociotechnical systems will provide insights of mutual benefit. We propose a preliminary framing of that comparison, introduce a notion of Digital Music Object that is analogous to the Research Object, and discuss some implications for digital libraries for musicology.

In Collaboration with In Concert: Reflecting a Digital Library as Linked Data for Performance Ephemera

Diverse datasets in the area of Digital Musicology expose complementary information describing works, composers, performers, and wider historical and cultural contexts. Interlinking across such datasets enables new digital methods of scholarly investigation. Such bridging presents challenges when working with legacy tabular or relational datasets that do not natively facilitate linking and referencing to and from external sources. Here, we present pragmatic approaches in turning such legacy datasets into linked data. InConcert is a research collaboration exemplifying these approaches. In this paper, we describe and build on this resource, which is comprised of distinct digital libraries focusing on performance data and on concert ephemera. These datasets were merged with each other and opened up for enrichment from other sources on the Web via conversion to RDF. We outline the main features of the constituent datasets, describe conversion workflows, and perform a comparative analysis. Our findings provide practical recommendations for future efforts focused on exposing legacy datasets as linked data.

Expert-guided semantic linking of music-library metadata for study and reuse

The process of aligning datasets that lack mutually-shared identifiers is fraught with ambiguity and difficult to automate. Manual performance of such a process may be time-consuming and error-prone. We present the Semantic Alignment and Linking Tool (SALT) that addresses this problem by applying semantic technologies and Linked Data approaches in order to produce candidate alignment suggestions that may be confirmed or disputed by a user with domain expertise. These decisions are integrated back into the knowledge base and are available for further iterative comparison by the user; the complete RDF graph is published and can be queried through the same SPARQL endpoint that also underlies the SALT user interface. Provenance of the musicologists judgement is captured and added to the descriptive graph, supporting further discourse and counter-proposals. We report on a use case and perform an evaluation of this tool within a musicological context, joining metadata from the British Library and other sources with programme data from BBC Radio 3 in a project focusing on early music.

Building Prototypes Aggregating Musicological Datasets on the Semantic Web

Abstract Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, and SPARQL can be successfully used to bridge complementary musicological information. In this paper, we describe, compare, and evaluate the datasets and workflows used to create two such aggregator projects: In Collaboration with In Concert, and JazzCats, both of which bring together a cluster of smaller projects containing concert and performance metadata.

Linked Data Publication of Live Music Archives and Analyses

We describe the publication of a linked data set exposing metadata from the Internet Archive Live Music Archive along with detailed feature analysis data of the audio files contained in the archive. The collection is linked to existing musical and geographical resources allowing for the extraction of useful or nteresting subsets of data using additional metadata.

Plans and performances: Parallels in the production of science and music

Whether in the science lab or the music studio, we go in with a plan, we perform, and we make a record of that performance for distribution, consumption, and reuse. Both domains are increasingly data-intensive, with the adoption of new technology, and also socially intensive with democratised and growing citizen engagement. The music industry has embraced digital technology throughout the lifecycle from composition to consumption; scientific practice, and scholarly communication, are also undergoing transformation. Is the music industry more digital than science? We suggest that comparing and contrasting these two systems will provide insights of mutual benefit. Our investigation explores the notion of the Digital Music Object, analogous to the Research Object, for rich capture, sharing and reuse of both process and content.

On organising multimedia performance corpora for musicological study using Linked Data

The wide availability of digital technologies has increased the quantity and diversity of information that can be collected from and about a musical performance. Making this data easily accessible for study by musicologists requires the development of supporting methodologies and tools to assist and automate its systematic cataloguing, archiving, and investigation. We report on the curation of a rich digital multimedia dataset captured from a complete performance of Richard Wagners Ring Cycle, supplemented by observations annotated by a musicologist during the course of the event. We describe the application of ontologies to codify the physical and temporal relationships between the events, artefacts, and their creators or annotators; and the method and tools to publish these performance corpora as Linked Data hyperstructures abiding by this schema. Finally we discuss the implications for hosting this data within a Digital Library infrastructure and how it can be used to support musicological investigation.

Publishing musicology using multimedia digital libraries: creating interactive articles through a framework for linked data and MEI

Modern web publishing enables sophisticated presentation of academic arguments, deploying evidence in different formats, using multiple media types, and through interactive user experiences. However, these developments have had little significant effect on the communication of musicology, which largely continues to be published in static and linear forms, and rarely with user interfaces that connect the different forms of supporting material. Our Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework uses RDF to associate music-related materials via structures afforded by the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). Here we describe the use of MELD for publishing multimedia musicology articles as web applications in which musically-meaningful relationships are mapped to the interactions a user experiences when moving between digital resources such as text, audio, video, and notation. We motivate our work with an enhanced interactive article studying the performance of works by Frederick Delius, and demonstrate our frameworks suitability for this situation by implementing a MELD application integrating TEI text, IIIF-served images, MEI notation and recordings of audio and video. We describe the semantic annotations which underpin this realisation, and how they relate the user experience of moving between this content to the musicological argument being marshalled. Through this example we illustrate how connecting diverse media types using musically-meaningful semantics can support a richer form of publication, beyond the current state of the art.

Dynamic Semantic Music Notation

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) XML schema expresses musical structure addressing score elements at musically meaningful levels of granularity (e.g., individual systems, measures, or notes). While this provides a comprehensive representation of music content, only concepts and relationships provided by the MEI schema can be encoded. Here, we present our Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework which applies RDF Web Annotations to targetted portions of the MEI structure. Concepts and relationships from the Semantic Web can be included alongside MEI in an expanded musical knowledge graph. We have implemented a music performance scenario which collects, distributes, and displays semantic annotations, enhancing a digital musical score used by performers in a live music jam session.

On providing semantic alignment and unified access to music library metadata

A variety of digital data sources—including institutional and formal digital libraries, crowd-sourced community resources, and data feeds provided by media organisations such as the BBC—expose information of musicological interest, describing works, composers, performers, and wider historical and cultural contexts. Aggregated access across such datasets is desirable as these sources provide complementary information on shared real-world entities. Where datasets do not share identifiers, an alignment process is required, but this process is fraught with ambiguity and difficult to automate, whereas manual alignment may be time-consuming and error-prone. We address this problem through the application of a Linked Data model and framework to assist domain experts in this process. Candidate alignment suggestions are generated automatically based on textual and on contextual similarity. The latter is determined according to user-configurable weighted graph traversals. Match decisions confirming or disputing the candidate suggestions are obtained in conjunction with user insight and expertise. These decisions are integrated into the knowledge base, enabling further iterative alignment, and simplifying the creation of unified viewing interfaces. Provenance of the musicologist’s judgement is captured and published, supporting scholarly discourse and counter-proposals. We present our implementation and evaluation of this framework, conducting a user study with eight musicologists. We further demonstrate the value of our approach through a case study providing aligned access to catalogue metadata and digitised score images from the British Library and other sources, and broadcast data from the BBC Radio 3 Early Music Show.