A philologist’s approach to heritage is traditionally based on the curation of documents, such as text, audio and video. However, with the advent of interactive multimedia, heritage becomes floating and volatile, and not easily captured in documents. We propose an approach to heritage that goes beyond documents. We consider the crucial role of institutes for interactive multimedia (as motor of a living culture of interaction) and propose that the digital philologist’s task will be to promote the collective/shared responsibility of (interactive) documenting, engage engineering in developing interactive approaches to heritage, and keep interaction-heritage alive through the education of citizens.
The journal paper Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music – In Journal Of New Music Research by Cornelis, Six, Holzapfel and Leman was published in a special issue about Computational Ethnomusicology of the Journal of New Music Research on the 20th of august 2013. Below you can find the abstract for the article, and the full text author version of the article itself.
Abstract: Large digital archives of ethnic music require automatic tools to provide musical content descriptions. While various automatic approaches are available, they are to a wide extent developed for Western popular music. This paper aims to analyze how automated tempo estimation approaches perform in the context of Central-African music. To this end we collect human beat annotations for a set of musical fragments, and compare them with automatic beat tracking sequences. We first analyze the tempo estimations derived from annotations and beat tracking results. Then we examine an approach, based on mutual agreement between automatic and human annotations, to automate such analysis, which can serve to detect musical fragments with high tempo ambiguity.
@article{cornelis2013tempo_jnmr,
author = {OlmoCornelis, JorenSix, AndreHolzapfel, andMarcLeman},
title = {{EvaluationandRecommendation of Pulse ant TempoAnnotationinEthnicMusic}},
journal = {{Journal of NewMusicResearch}},
volume = {42},
number = {2},
pages = {131-149},
year = {2013},
doi = {10.1080/09298215.2013.812123}
}
The journal paper Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis of Western and Non-Western Music by Six, Cornelis, and Leman was published in a special issue about Computational Ethnomusicology of the Journal of New Music Research on the 20th of august 2013. Below you can find the abstract for the article, and pointers to audio examples, the Tarsos software, and the author version of the article itself.
Abstract: This paper presents Tarsos, a modular software platform used to extract and analyze pitch organization in music. With Tarsos pitch estimations are generated from an audio signal and those estimations are processed in order to form musicologically meaningful representations. Tarsos aims to offer a flexible system for pitch analysis through the combination of an interactive user interface, several pitch estimation algorithms, filtering options, immediate auditory feedback and data output modalities for every step. To study the most frequently used pitches, a fine-grained histogram that allows up to 1200 values per octave is constructed. This allows Tarsos to analyze deviations in Western music, or to analyze specific tone scales that differ from the 12 tone equal temperament, common in many non-Western musics. Tarsos has a graphical user interface or can be launched using an API – as a batch script. Therefore, it is fit for both the analysis of individual songs and the analysis of large music corpora. The interface allows several visual representations, and can indicate the scale of the piece under analysis. The extracted scale can be used immediately to tune a MIDI keyboard that can be played in the discovered scale. These features make Tarsos an interesting tool that can be used for musicological analysis, teaching and even artistic productions.
Ladrang Kandamanyura (slendro pathet manyura), is the name of the piece used in the article throughout section 2. The album on which the piece can be found is available at wergo. Below a thirty second fragment is embedded. You can also download the thirty second fragment to analyse it yourself.
Below the BibTex entry for the article is embedded.
Beyond documentation – The digital philology of interaction heritage
Presentation, JNMR, Research papers, and UGent
The journal paper Evaluation and Recommendation of Pulse and Tempo Annotation in Ethnic Music – In Journal Of New Music Research by Cornelis, Six, Holzapfel and Leman was published in a special issue about Computational Ethnomusicology of 
jnmr.cover.jpg and 2013.10.09.Tempo_annotation_in_ethnic_music-JNMR-Author_Version.pdf
The journal paper Tarsos, a Modular Platform for Precise Pitch Analysis of Western and Non-Western Music by Six, Cornelis, and Leman was published in a special issue about Computational Ethnomusicology of