The workshop was very successful in bringing together researchers from different backgrounds, ranging from musicology to engineering and computer science.  We welcomed nearly 50 participants from all over Europe and beyond.

The program included 14 talks and 14 posters all of which showed an interest in employing computational methods for the analysis or understanding of music.

On Thursday afternoon, Emilia Gómez from the Music Technology Group of the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona gave a keynote talk on Computer-Assisted Transcription and Description of Music Recordings. This was combined with the regular eHumanities research meeting, so that researchers from other fields of Computational Humanities research also attended.

On Friday afternoon, a panel session on transcription continued the questions raised by Emilia’s presentation, namely in how far computer transcription can help us to understand music from different cultural backgrounds. The panel was moderated by Ashley Burgoyne (Amsterdam Univeristy). The panelists were Kofi Agawu (Princeton University), Dániel P. Biró (University of Victoria), Olmo Cornelis (University College Ghent, Belgium), Emilia Gómez (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona), and Barbara Titus (Utrecht University). The panelists have different backgrounds in music research, as some use computational aids for music transcription and analysis, while others rely on traditional methods, or on a combination of approaches. The discussion showed that computational methods and tools cannot exist independently from musicological research topics and questions to be supportive in musicological research.

The workshop ended with a performance by Naomi Sato on sho, and Harrie Starreveld on shakuhachi. They played traditional Japanese compositions for these instruments, and musically concluded two successful days of discourse on music analysis.

More details can be found on the website of the workshop:
http://www.elab-oralculture.nl/fma2013/

The talks are available on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9qy3wyBXU4PJnIsPQF5udzPebo7H_O3j

The proceedings are available online:
http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/math/2013-0604-200726/UUindex.html

The Café Scientifique is an international initiative to host presentations by scientists from different domains in an informal environment. Amsterdam’s Café Scientifique is organized by students of the University of Amsterdam. For their evening on “Computer Music”, they invited me to speak on computational analysis of music. I explained probabilistic models such as Markov chains, which have played an important role both in automatic composition and in analysis of music. Finally, I showed how I apply these models for my research on the Dutch Song Database.

Among the other guests were Tijs Ham from the Utrecht Conservatory, who performed some music with Live Coding; Jos Zwaanenburg en Stephan Raidl from the Amsterdam Conservatory, who presented interactions between acoustic and electronic instruments; and Alex van Venrooij from the Department for Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam, who spoke about the spread of electronic music in Europe and the United States.

It was a varied evening with a round of questions in the end for all presenters and performers, and it was a great experience to speak to such a mixed audience.

Abstract
The recurrence of characteristic motifs plays an important role in the identification of a folk song melody as member of a tune family. Based on a unique data set with expert annotations of motif occurrences in a collection of Dutch folk song melodies, we define 15 abstract motif classes. Taking a computational approach, we evaluate to what extent these 15 motif classes contribute to automatic identification of folk songs. We define various similarity measures for melodies represented as sequences of motif occurrences. In a retrieval experiment, alignment measures appear the most successful. The results are additionally improved by taking into account the phrase position of motif occurrences. These insights motivate future research to improve automatic motif detection and retrieval performance, and to determine similarity between melodies on the basis of motifs.

This paper will be presented at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, July 23-28, 2012 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Abstract
This paper deals with current research into melodic stability and variation in cadences as they occur in oral and semi-oral traditions. Creating a new framework for melodic transcription, we have quantized and compared cadences found in Torah trope, strophic melodies from the Dutch folk song collection Onder de groene linde and Qur’an recitation. Working within this new transcription framework, we have developed computational methods to analyze similarity and variation in melodic formulas in cadences as they occur in recorded examples of the before-mentioned oral/semi-oral traditions. We have investigated stability and variation using histogram–based scales, melodic contours, and melodic outlines for recorded examples and we interpret our findings with regard to mechanisms of the process of oral transmission in these oral/semi-oral traditions.

This paper will be presented at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, July 23-28, 2012 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Abstract
This paper investigates the concept of variation in music from the perspective of music similarity. Music similarity is a central concept in Music Information Retrieval (MIR), however there exists no comprehensive approach to music similarity yet. As a consequence, MIR faces the challenge on how to relate musical features to the experience of similarity by listeners. Musicologists and studies in music cognition have argued that variation in music leads to the experience of similarity. In this paper we review the concept of variation from three different research strands: MIR, Musicology, and Cognitive Science. We show that all of these disciplines have contributed insights to the study of variation that are important for modelling variation as a foundation for similarity. We introduce research steps that need to be taken to model variation as a base for music similarity estimation within a computational approach.

This paper will be presented at the 12th International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, July 23-28, 2012 in Thessaloniki, Greece.

Abstract
We present ongoing research on the role of motifs in oral transmission of stories. We assume that motifs constitute the primary building blocks of stories. On the basis of a quantitative analysis we show that the level of motif annotation utilized in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale type catalogue is well suited to analyze two genres of folktales in terms of motif sequences. However, for the other five genres in the catalogue the annotation level is not apt, because it is unable to bring to front the commonalities between stories.

This paper will be presented at the LREC workshop Computational Models of Narrative on 16 and 17 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.

Also see the publications section.