Over the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of music from different traditions from a computational perspective. Researchers with interests in this area have been meeting at the ISMIR conferences and communicate through an interest group in computational ethnomusicology, ethnocomp.
My interests started in 2008, with a study about how tonal features, extracted from music audio signals, can be useful to automatically organize music recordings from different traditions. It basically consisted on characterizing the scale by means of high-resolution HPCP features and combining these features with timbre and rhythm descriptors. As a result, we established some relationships between audio features and geography in our ISMIR2009 paper on Music and geography: content description of musical audio from different parts of the world. After that, I got interested in MIR and Flamenco music, and I have been working in a system for the automatic transcription of flamenco singing, thanks to the COFLA project. This is a challenging task, that will require a dedicated post!
ethnocomp has always been a small community, and two years ago we had the first event devoted to this research area, the first Folk Music Analysis (FMA) workshop that took place in Athens, Greece. Last year I had the chance of co-organizing the 2nd FMA in Seville, my home town, which was jointly organized with a conference on flamenco research. At the last ISMIR in Porto, we could see an increasing interest in this small field, and there was a large number of people attending the ethnocomp ‘dinner?. Moreover, at my research group, my boss Xavier Serra is leading an ERC grant dealing with MIR and traditional music, compmusic. I am very happy that this field gets more attention, and that we address the fact that all our technology has been designed for Western popular music. There is much work to do to develop culture-specific or culture-aware tools.
I then hope that this year’s FMA, which will take place in Amsterdam, will be a success! I am sure it will be a truly interdisciplinary event, gathering people from ethnomusicology, music performance and music information retrieval.
Topics include:
– Computational ethnomusicology
– Retrieval systems for non-western and folk musics
– New methods for music transcription
– Formalization of musical data
– Folk music classification systems
– Models of oral transmission of music
– Cognitive modelling of music
– Aesthetics and related philosophical issues
– Methodological issues
– Representational issues and models
– Audio and symbolic representations
– Formal and computational music analysis
Important dates:
3 February 2013: Deadline for abstract submissions
10 March 2013: Notification of acceptance/rejection of submissions
5 May 2013: Deadline for submission of revised abstracts or full papers
6 and 7 June: Workshop
Don’t miss it!!!!
Emilia Gómez: personal website 