Opportunities for a cultural specific approach in the computational description of music

Abstract

The current research in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is showing the potential that the Information Technologies can have in music related applications. A/nmajor research challenge in that direction is how to automatically/ndescribe/annotate audio recordings and how to use the resulting descriptions to discover and appreciate music in new ways. But music is a complex phenomenon/nand the description of an audio recording has to deal with this complexity. For example, each music/nculture has specificities and emphasizes different musical/nand communication aspects, thus the musical recordings of each culture should be described differently. At the same time these cultural specificities give us the opportunity to pay attention to musical concepts and/nfacets that, despite being present in most world musics, are not easily noticed by listeners. In this paper we present some of the work done in the CompMusic project, including ideas and specific examples on how to take advantage of the cultural specificities of different/nmusical repertoires. We will use examples from the art music traditions of India, Turkey and China.