Tim Crawford, Computational Musicology, Goldsmiths University of London: Busy Going Nowhere, or Learning to Live with Error? Personal reflections on three decades using computers with music - CANCELLED

The lecture will take place in TANNA SCHULICH HALL, followed by a wine and cheese reception in room A832-833 (8th floor of the Elizabeth Wirth New Music Building).


ABSTRACT: 

From an initial vision in the mid-1980s that the new "Personal Computer" could offer exciting new ways to do musicology, through the realisation that no part of that process did not contain unsolved problems, it didn't take long come to an understanding that only by collaboration with others could anything at all be achieved. Getting interested people from different disciplines together in the same room to talk about music and how to tackle it was easier than I expected, though it's still unclear whether we were in fact always talking about the same thing. Arising in some degree from such conversations, with the addition of a certain amount of good fortune in grant funding, and coinciding with the nascent revolution in digital music distribution at the turn of the new century, the ISMIR conferences essentially catalysed a new hybrid discipline, Music Information Retrieval. But all the time, a nagging question recurs: "What can all this do for me?". Without providing too many definitively negative answers, I hope to show some ways in which music - the stuff studied in musicology - resists the rigid categorisation and analysis axiomatic to MIR. While this is hardly a new observation, I would like to think that accepting this apparent "failure" is one of the keys for success in getting computers to work their magic.

 

ABOUT TIM CRAWFORD: 

CrawfordTim Crawford worked as a professional lutenist, playing on several recordings made during the 1980s. As a musicologist he mostly studies lute music of the 16th to 18th centuries, although this has taken him into wider studies of the music of Bach and Handel, and even Mozart. He was a co-editor of the Complete Works of the lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750), an exact contemporary and acquaintance of J.S. Bach, for Das Erbe deutscher Musik (Bärenreiter, 2002-13).  Since the early 1990s, Tim has also been active in the rapidly-expanding field of music information retrieval and served as President of its international society, ISMIR, for two years. He is currently Professorial Research Fellow in Computational Musicology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is Principal Investigator of the Transforming Musicology project.