As Lauren wrote in her email to the EMPRes list:
This week’s paper is a bit different – it’s an explanation of a Matlab
toolbox for music information retrieval. Getting to know this software
will I’m sure make music research like ours much quicker and less
painful.
Hmm. Well. We still think this is the case, but for researchers and students disciplined primarily (or exclusively) in Music rather than the sciences, it’s not a straightforward step!
Matlab is a programming language for technical computing. The Matlab toolbox for music information retrieval by researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, comprises a modular suite of programs which allow the user to extract data on musically-important features, such as pitch, tempo, beat-clarity and key, from audio recordings. The MIR toolbox – based as it is in the Matlab environment – allows statistical analyses of these features on a potentially grand scale.
If you’re someone whose understanding of music intuitively draws you towards ethnographic or ethnomusicological research, such computational approaches to music research and analysis can seem anathema. You may feel that a detailed case study or historical or archival research is the only way to do justice to the topic: music-making is infinitely diverse and context-specific; musical experience is highly individual. But, of course, we need all approaches, don’t we? It’s not a matter of pitting the power of the computational approach against the detail and nuance of the ethnographic case study. When advocates for both such approaches can understand enough of the other’s methods to interpret their evidence fully, that’s when we get some progress.
On this basis, this particular reading group session became the springboard for a little EMPRes spin-off, when Eric Barnhill offered to run a series of workshops to introduce us to the wonders of Matlab…
