Strengthening Interdisciplinarity in MIR: Four Examples of Using MIR Tools for Musicology

Abstract

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a fundamentally interdisciplinary field. Nonetheless, a number of presentations at previous ISMIR conferences have noted that there are some fields to which MIR seems to have a natural connection but with which there have been relatively fewer collaborations. Musicology is one of the most commonly cited fields where there are good opportunities for more interaction with MIR, and this paper presents four examples of using fundamental MIR concepts and software tools (the MIR and MIDI toolboxes) to start such collaborations. The four examples cover a wide range of musicological periods, from religious chant to 20th-century pop music, and also a wide range of MIR techniques, from concepts based on symbolic data to audio-only methods that avoid the concept of a musical score altogether. We hope that other researchers may extend or adapt our examples to answer their own musicological questions and foster their own collaborations between MIR and musicology.