Knowledge Discovery as Applied to Music: Will Music Web Retrieval Revolutionize Musicology?

Abstract

The present authors share the characteristic of a significant participation in R&D projects for designing and implementing interactive systems in the field of digital music: tools for computer-based assistance to browsing sound and music data, assisted analysis and commenting systems for musical works, or assisted interactive environments for the creation of interactive virtual works. In spite of the diversity of their experience and practice, the authors are aiming at renewing the theoretical framework of musicology, which is working in the background of their creation or engineering activities, since a massive digital inscription of music allows its objects to be handled by programs, or even to be transformed into programs executable by other programs. Such a framework is only a model, which functions only if it allows us to interpret artefacts and phenomena, producing at the same moment a consistent musicological language, a space for the categorisation and evaluation of realisations, as well as a number of objectives for technological deployment and theoretical evolution. But, within a research teams, we also require that these models could provide capitalisation structures for experience, know-how and acquired knowledge.