presentations added

presentations.json

@@ -27,15 +27,15 @@
     "presenter": "Ewa Dahlig-Turek(1) & Craig Stuart Sapp(2)",
     "affiliation": "(1) The Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, (2) CCARH/PHI/Stanford University, California, USA",
     "title": "Digitalisation of musical notations from Oskar Kolberg's Complete Works as an example of technological development of national cultural resources",
-    "abstract": "",
+    "abstract": "EsAC (Essener Assoziativ Code), one of the oldest music encoding formats still in use today, was developed in the 1980s at the University of Essen by Helmut Schaffrath. Widely recognized in digital musicology for the dataset commonly referred to as the Essen Folksong Collection from this time, the code still remains in active use at The Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw for inputting extensive musical resources that form an important part of Poland's national cultural heritage.\\nThe core of the Polish EsAC resource is a collection based on songs and ethnographic documentation gathered by Oskar Kolberg (1814–1896), comprising over 20 000 musical records. This extensive collection offers invaluable comparative material for research across Europe, such as the study of musical themes in European ballads, individual genres of musical folklore, tonal structures, rhythmic patterns, and more. It also opens new pathways for exploring the relationship between composers' works and musical folklore, especially as the EsAC database continues to expand with additional sources.\\nAlongside the development of Kolberg resources, the webEsAC application has been developed (https://webesac.pcss.pl), along with a dedicated version for the Kolberg collection (https://kolberg.ispan.pl/webesac), enabling both editing and searching musical content, as well as some analytical work. The existing functionality of webEsAC includes reducing songs to melodic or rhythmic patterns, transforming scale degree sequences into interval sequences, abstracting scales, cadential notes, and sequences of accented notes, as well as generating statistics of scales and rhythmic structures. The presentation will showcase examples of these analytical processes. Users can also contribute their own EsAC resources to the webEsAC database.\\nGiven the limitations of the EsAC format, which is primarily designed for only recording monophonic music, further developments in the use of the collected data will need to take place outside this system. New opportunities have arisen from converting EsAC data to the Humdrum format, particularly through the Art Institute's collaboration with Craig Sapp to expand Verovio Humdrum Viewer (https://verovio.humdrum.org) to support EsAC data directly.  This expansion enables dynamic notation display while editing EsAC melodies, browsing the Kolberg collection through the VHV interface, and online conversion to other digital formats, including Humdrum, MIDI, MusicXML, and MEI, providing additional ways to disseminate EsAC data to other analysis platforms. VHV also provides links directly to scanned sources of the Kolberg collection, useful for comparing EsAC encodings with the original music notation.\\nIn addition, Humdrum analysis tools are available online for use directly with EsAC data through dynamic conversion to Humdrum data, or with additional analyses possible offline.  Humdrum's large-scale analysis capabilities for EsAC collections, particularly Kolberg's, will be highlighted, including searches for EsAC melody quotations in Humdrum musical databases such as The Fryderyk Chopin Institute's collections of Chopin's music and 8 000 scores from the Polish Music in Open Access project.",
     "date": "2024-10-24",
     "time": "12:00"
   },
   {
     "presenter": "Anna Matuszewska",
     "affiliation": "The Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw",
     "title": "Bridging Traditional Musicology and Digital Methods. Case study: Interactive Diagrammatic Analysis of Music-Text Corpora",
-    "abstract": "",
+    "abstract": "The increasing digitization of music collections and the availability of a variety of analytical tools are opening up research perspectives for both statistical music analysis and corpus-based research. However, as seen in the case of the Essen Folksong Collection, this type of research has gained relatively little interest. The data made available—approximately 5,300 monophonic tunes from Germanic regions encoded in EsAC format and converted to Humdrum—has been primarily used by researchers in cognitive musicology or Music Information Retrieval (MIR).\\nOne of the key reasons for this limited use is the complicated process of acquiring the relevant digital competencies, which are non-specific to traditional musicology. Additionally, the specifics of the encoding format dictate the choice of tools, narrowing the possibility of finding comparable corpora for analysis. As a result, many digitized music corpora remain underutilized, often only analyzed by their creators or not used at all, either due to technical limitations or language barriers. \\nThis paper addresses these challenges by demonstrating how to overcome linguistic and technical barriers through data visualization and diagrammatic analysis. It presents an initial draft of an interactive analytical interface designed according to a user-centered approach, enabling traditional musicologists to explore large music corpora and draw initial conclusions about their subsets. The essence of the interface lies in allowing users to browse music databases on two levels: close reading (detailed analysis of single tunes) and distant reading (broad analysis of entire corpora or user-defined subsets). This approach provides a multi-layered but accessible overview of the database, allowing for the classification and comparison of its subsets.\\nThe interface is built around customizable dashboards that present coupled diagrams visualizing the results of melodic, rhythmic, and text analyses. Users can define up to three subsets of the corpus, compare them, and filter data based on set parameters. For close reading, the analysis can be further narrowed to phrases, measures, or motifs. The interactive elements, including filters and range-limiting sliders, allow users to view the corpus from various perspectives without requiring advanced technical skills.\\nThe potential of this diagrammatic approach to music analysis is significant, as it can increase interest in existing collections and unlock the potential for comparative research. Presenting analytical results through diagrams makes the data easier to interpret, and the interface's interactive design enables users to adjust their views to suit different research goals. \\nThe paper is divided into two case studies: a statistical music analysis performed using HumdrumR software on Oskar Kolberg's Opera Omnia (19,000 Polish folk tunes), and a text analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods applied to 2,000 monophonic tunes from the Essen Folksong Collection, carried out using the R programming language. These examples showcase the practical application of the proposed interface and its ability to facilitate detailed exploration of large music-text corpora.",
     "date": "2024-10-24",
     "time": "12:30"
   },
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@
     "presenter": "Benjamin Ory",
     "affiliation": "Villa I Tatti, Harvard University",
     "title": "Elucidating a Shift in Musical Style using Digital Tools",
-    "abstract": "",
+    "abstract": "Sometime between 1520 and 1530, a new aesthetic paradigm for European art music took hold on the Italian peninsula. Although simple enough to describe in general terms, scholars have long been unsure exactly how, when, and where these stylistic changes occurred, owing to limited information about composer biographies and a fuzzy understanding of seminal musical sources from the 1520s. At the same time, more music survives from this decade than any individual scholar can hope to control. The result has been that historians have told an oversimplified story prioritizing the major composers of the early sixteenth century, or those of the mid sixteenth century, at the expense of those in between.\\nMy 1520s Project aims to meet this challenge by making available more than 400 scores ca. 1510–40 and enabling me to undertake corpus analyses and data visualizations to capture the shift in musical texture. In my presentation, I focus on an emerging preference for thicker textures. This trend is first apparent in works from the 1510s such as Adrian Willaert’s <i>Verbum bonum</i> and Costanzo Festa’s <i>Tribus miraculis</i>, and it comes to dominate sixteenth-century musical style. My corpus allows me to establish a set of newly identified characteristics that set the “sonically saturated” music of the 1520s apart from the contrastive aesthetic preferred by the generation of composers surrounding Josquin des Prez. I show how historians—struggling to date manuscript sources—have errantly suggested that pervasive imitation emerged long before the technique actually became prevalent, in the years leading up to 1530.\\nThe 1520s Project challenges the ways in which scholars engage with the music of the Renaissance. Too often, sixteenth-century specialists—understandably overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of music that survives—lose sight of the forest for the trees. As a result, they develop ill-fitting historiographical paradigms, establish musical terminology hyper-focused on just a fraction of the repertory, or turn away from musical aesthetics altogether. The 1520s Project offers a model for analysis that uses a corpus to draw conclusions far more in line with the historical record.",
     "date": "2024-10-25",
     "time": "10:30"
   },