Researching Current Corpus / Musicological Database Projects
There are many efforts underway to collect and encode large databases of musical works for preservation, study, distribution, etc. Many of these databases are accessible online and have bodies of research associated with them.
In groups of two, prepare a 3–5 page short paper (800–1500 words) that explores the aims and methods of a corpus project active in the past ten years. An acceptable project will involve acquiring, maintaining, and carrying out research on a digital database of musical scores or other musical objects.
Think about and attempt to answer questions such as the following:
- What are the goals of the project? (required question that must be answered)
- Who are the participants, in terms of both principal people and institutions, and who is the audience? (Aside: Who provides financial support for the project?)
- How are scores or other musical data encoded and distributed? What are the advantages and disadvantages of their methods?
- What is the overall extent of the “problem” and how much of this problem can the project reasonably solve in a limited (5-year or so) timetable?
- What are the strengths and weaknesses of the project? Is it feasible?
- How do the methods and means by which the project accomplishes its goals affect the accessibility (by people or computers) of either the database or the outcome of the research on those databases?
- What could YOU do with this corpus? What questions relevant to this class could you answer?* (required question that must be addressed)
* if the answer to this last question is “Nothing!” then move on to another project.
Some of these questions may not be relevant to your particular project, but they may be thought-provoking nonetheless.
It may be helpful to read through scholarly papers associated with not only the project but also the researchers involved in the project, so you can gain a better understanding of their background. Also, familiarize yourself with the subject matter being addressed by the particular project. For instance, if you are researching Electronic Corpus of Lute Music, it may be helpful to gain a rudimentary understanding of how to read lute tablature.
My preference is to find a project to create a corpus of encoded musical scores that can be readable by software such as music21, but if you are enticed by a project that encodes something else, such as PDFs of scores or audio files, feel free to write about it. Please don’t choose something too obvious, like IMSLP or Wikipedia.
Lastly, if you want to go further, don’t be afraid to email the researchers themselves! Most academics love to talk about their work and would be more than happy to provide you with more information!
Potential Projects
- OpenScore project (or subprojects such as OpenScore lieder)
- MuseScore.com (formerly the same people as MuseScore.org, but a different project)
- Single Interface for Musical Score Search and Analysis (SIMSSA)
- Cantus Database or Global Chant Database
- Josquin Research Project
- Online Chopin Variorum Edition
- Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM)
- Electronic Corpus of Lute Music (ECOLM)
- Computerized Mensural Music Editing (CMME)
- Vienna 4x22 Piano Corpus
- Digital Du Chemin
- Boston College Collection of Irish Tunes
- VGmusic
- Songsterr
- Hooktheory
- Annotated Beethoven Corpus
- JazzCats (not a score project, but super great)
Directories of Projects
- https://wiki.ccarh.org/wiki/Digital_Resources_for_Musicology
- https://www.musicxml.com/music-in-musicxml/
In addition to normal things like quality of writing, following instructions, etc., your paper will be judged on the following criteria:
- Questions from the list above answered
- Connections of the corpus to potential future research projects that can be done in this class
- Originality (a few points for finding something not on this list!)
Include in the paper, if relevant:
- URL links (to the main project page and datasets)
- Citations of papers that came out of or which use the project (if any)
- Screenshots (numbered as figures, with captions, referred to in the text)
