Research Articles & Commentaries

Abstract

In this commentary, I raise several issues of method and presentation and suggest a number of follow-up experiments associated with some of these issues. Broad suggestions are also made (or rather preached): the need to deal empirically with musical emotions subtler than the oft-investigated basic emotions, and the role that interactions between musical variables may play in shaping subtle musical expression, as exemplified by some well-known xylophone soli from the orchestral repertory.

Abstract

The automatic analysis of large musical corpora by means of computational models overcomes some limitations of manual analysis, and the unavailability of scores for most existing music makes necessary to work with audio recordings. Until now, research on this area has focused on music from the Western tradition. Nevertheless, we might ask if the available methods are suitable when analyzing music from other cultures. We present an empirical approach to the comparative analysis of audio recordings, focusing on tonal features and data mining techniques. Tonal features are related to the pitch class distribution, pitch range and employed scale, gamut and tuning system. We provide our initial but promising results obtained when trying to automatically distinguish music from Western and non- Western traditions; we analyze which descriptors are most relevant and study their distribution over 1500 pieces from different traditions and styles. As a result, some feature distributions differ for Western and non-Western music, and the obtained classification accuracy is higher than 80% for different classification algorithms and an independent test set. These results show that automatic description of audio signals together with data mining techniques provide means to characterize huge music collections from different traditions and complement musicological manual analyses.

Abstract

The article by Gómez and Herrera presents an original methodology, audaciously situated on a challenging junction between computer science, cognitive science and ethnomusicology. We hope expert ethnomusicologists will understand the experimental aspect of such a cross-disciplinary undertaking, and will pardon the potential imperfection in this computational attempt toward cross-cultural understanding. Despite the few shortcomings discussed in this commentary, we think the general methodology described in this paper is of high interest.

Abstract

Honing and Ladinig (2008) make the assertion that while the internal validity of web-based studies may be reduced, this is offset by an increase in external validity possible when experimenters can sample a wider range of participants and experimental settings. In this paper, the issue of internal validity is more closely examined, and it is agued that there is no necessary reason why internal validity of a web-based study should be worse than that of a lab-based one. Errors of measurement or inconsistencies of manipulation will typically balance across conditions of the experiment, and thus need not necessarily threaten the validity of a study's findings.