A review of manual and computational approaches for the study of world music corpora

Abstract

The comparison of world music cultures has been a recurring topic in the field of musicology since the end of the nineteenth century. Recent advances in technology in the field of Music Information Retrieval allow for a large-scale analysis of music corpora. We review manual and computational approaches in the literature that fall within the scope of music corpus research and world music analysis. With a large-scale computational music corpus analysis in mind, we compare the tools and research questions addressed by each study and discuss strengths and weaknesses. Taking into account critical remarks from experts in the field and challenges involved in a large-scale computational analysis, we discuss how this line of research can be improved in future work.

Keywords:

• Music information retrieval
• ethnomusicology
• comparative musicology
• world music
• corpus analysis

Notes

Maria Panteli, Centre for Digital Music, Queen Mary University of London, UK.

1 The Royal Museum for Central Africa http://music.africamuseum.be.

2 In some cases, copyright exceptions encourage research with audio recordings as long as the research is non-commercial, the resources are properly acknowledged, and the research results cannot recreate the original works (see e.g. regulations for research in the UK at https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/intellectual-property-office).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Queen Mary University of London [Principal’s Research Studentship]; Royal Academy of Engineering [Research Fellowship (RF/128)].