International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance

A Non-Governmental Organization in Formal Consultative Relations with UNESCO

Meetings and News

Audience: 
- Private group -

In September 2004 the Study Group met in Vilnius, by the invitation of Prof. Rimantas Astrauskas from the Lithuanian Music Academy. The meeting was devoted to two main subjects: 

(1) Technical problems of sound archives
Papers: Ivar Mogstad, Trondheim (Sound Archive of the Norwegian Council for Folk Song and Folk Dance ), Ewa Dahlig-Turek, Warsaw (Phonogram Archive of the Institute of Art in Warsaw: History, structure, tasks), Jacek Jackowski, Warsaw (Phonogram Archive: recording, archiving, digitization), Arleta Nawrocka-Wysocka, Poznan (Phonogram Archive of the Instutute of Arts: Projects of the Poznan section).

Presentations and discussions of this part of the conference concentrated on technical problems of sound archives. In many East European countries music archives suffer from underfinancing, which results in poor state of collections. Most advanced technology is unavailable, therefore participants discussed more realistic solutions (equipment for digitalization, types of mass-storage, database systems) that could help prevent further damage of recordings and improve access to information. 

(2) Computer-aided research
Papers: Rytis Ambrazevicius, Vilnius (Problems of scaling in traditional music), David Halperin (From Notes to Segments: First Stage in Syntax), Sven Ahlbäck, Stockholm (Modelling Melody Cognition – a computerized method of analysis of melodic surface structure), Daniel Muellensiefen, Klaus Frieler, Hamburg (SIMILE – a ‚melodic’ tool box).

In this section discussions went into a cognitive direction. Participants discussed problems of a computer-aided segmentation of music (Halperin, Ahlbäck), evaluation of music similarity (Müllensiefen and Frieler) and scale-perception (Ambrazevicius). Daniel Müllensiefen and Klaus Frieler presented a software package SIMILE, a tool using a special format of data, but also able to read data from the EsAC (Essener Assoziativ Code), in which thousands of tunes have already been encoded. The authors use EsAC-data as a material to experiment. Sven Ahlbäck came up with a computerized method of analysis of melodic surface structure which results in a hierarchical segmentation of monophonic melodies including a classification of the segments based on melodic similarity and syntactical relationships. The software uses Standard MIDI files. 

Ewa Dahlig-Turek
-----
The Study Group on Computer Aided Research meets in Warsaw, September 19-22.2001. The main theme of the conference is "Computer-aided Solving of Analytical Problems", therefore, we wait for papers on problems, materials, methods and results. Selected papers will be published in a special issue of the Polish musicological quarterly Muzyka in conference languages.

Proposals for presentations should be sent to Dr. Ewa Dahlig: