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Editorial

Multidisciplinarity in the Journal of New Music Research

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In this double issue of the Journal of New Music Research, we have gathered together seven papers on a broad range of topics, including music information retrieval, instrumental acoustics, instrument design and luthiery, sound synthesis, music and language, scales and modes, and aesthetics. This range of subject areas nicely illustrates the uniquely broad, multi- and trans-disciplinarity of the Journal. This double issue brings together contributions from experts in areas as diverse as mathematics, applied mechanics, industrial design, computer music, computer science and musicology.

Music is particularly distinguished with respect to the remarkably wide range of different perspectives and approaches that one can adopt to study it. Indeed, it is hard to think of any other class of human or natural phenomena that has been addressed from such a huge range of different angles—historical, sociological, biological, psychological, physical, mathematical, computational, linguistic, and philosophical, as well as from the point of view of engineering. Our Journal is unique in welcoming research on any aspect of music from any empirically grounded methodological perspective, provided, of course, that the work has sufficient rigour, quality and interest. This makes the Journal a unique nexus of multidisciplinarity—no other high-quality journal publishes scientific and technical work on music from such a broad range of perspectives.

In the first paper in this double issue, ‘Similarity of structures in popular music’, Benoît Corsini from Eindhoven University of Technology, proposes a method for comparing popular songs based on a novel metric that measures the distance between two similarity matrices. Corsini shows how the metric can be used to obtain meaningful clusterings that reflect distinctive uses of certain patterns by certain artists or within certain periods or genres. He applies the new metric to a number of classification tasks, including recognition of year or decade of composition, artist and genre. The results indicate that the approach is of particular interest for its ability to reveal and highlight specific interesting behaviours within corpora.

In the second paper, ‘The Modal Behaviour of a Violin Corpus’, Özge Akar and Kai Willner from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, adopt a novel approach to using numerical modelling to accurately understand the modal behaviour of the resonant body (‘corpus’) of a specific violin. They first identify material parameters through experiments and modal analysis of the raw woods. They then carry out an experimental modal analysis of the substructures of the violin and build finite element models based on accurate scans of the parts. These experimental modal parameters are compared with those obtained through numerical analysis. Finally the whole violin corpus is assessed. Good agreement between the numerical and experimental results indicates that standard modal analysis techniques can be successfully applied to a very complex mechanical system. The approach can be applied in various areas such as the development of digital optimisation tools for luthiers, digital reconstruction of historical instruments and advancing instrument design.

In the third paper, ‘Design for Performability: A Proposal for Democratic Redesign of the Classical Guitar’, Alkin Korkmaz and Owain Pedgley of the Middle East Technical University in Ankara report on design research that aimed to determine the potential for redesigning the classical guitar, whether iteratively or radically, from the perspective of luthiers, composers and performers. They conducted 25 interviews in order to identify shared and unique concerns among the stakeholder groups. The findings were used to conceive and develop a new design-related musical term, `performability’, which has stronger interactional and experiential dimensions than the established term, `playability’. The research demonstrates that industrial designers can fulfill a mediating and catalysing role within a democratic process of instrument design. Finally, the paper proposes a `design for performability’ framework suited to co-design sessions aimed towards developing a highly performable classical guitar.

The fourth paper, ‘Theory and Practice of Higher-Order Frequency Modulation Synthesis’, by Victor Lazzarini and Joseph Timoney of Maynooth University, Kildare, Ireland, aims to fill some gaps in the otherwise well developed field of frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. When first-order FM is extended simply by applying the modulation to the frequency, a DC component is introduced into the modulating signal that can result in carrier drift. Lazzarini and Timoney put forward a novel method called higher-order frequency modulation (hoFM) in which they apply amplitude modulation concurrently with FM, thus eliminating the DC component and any carrier drift caused by it. They then extend this to higher-order topologies and advance the concept of an FM operator (analogous to that used in phase modulation instrument design) in order to realise hoFM.

The research presented in the fifth paper in this double issue, ‘Phonetics as a means of nationalising art songs: A comparative music-phonetics study based on Zhao Yuanren's New Poetry Collection’, is the result of a collaboration between the Catholic University of Daegu, Republic of Korea (W. Xiaoyu, X. Ying, L. Shilin,R. Xiubo,Y. Dan,Y. Xinran, X. Qiujian) and Yanshan University, People’s Republic of China (L. Junrui, D. Jinjing and X. Qiujian). The authors explore the relationship between music and language in a corpus of Chinese art songs by Zhao Yuanren. Their focus is on the way in which melody and poetry are fused to create a vivid sense of national identity. The authors analyse structural and phonetic aspects of the melodies in Yuanren’s New Poetry Collection and supplement this with analyses of frequency, intensity and pitch. The authors conclude that the music studied adheres to certain specific linguistic constraints and that the phonetic elements identified may have broader applications in other artistic domains.

In the sixth paper in this double issue, ‘Common and Distinct Quantitative Characteristics of Chinese and Western Music in Terms of Modes, Scales, Degrees and Melody Variations’, Nan Nan (Xi'an Jiaotong University) and Xiaohong Guan (Xi'an Jiaotong University and Tsinghua University, Beijing) present a comparative analysis of Chinese pentatonic music and Western heptatonic music with respect to their modes, scales, degrees and melodic variations. The analysis indicates that the modes, scales and degrees used in both Chinese and Western music show a preference for what the authors call ‘bright’ modes and scales. The authors present three interval-dividing metrics to explore melody variations quantitatively and show that, when viewed through the lens of these metrics, both Chinese and Western music follow a power law.

In the final paper in this double issue, ‘The Aesthetics of Deconstruction: Neural Synthesis of Transformation Matrices Using GANs on Multichannel Polyphonic MIDI Data’, Philon Nguyen and Eldad Tsabary of Concordia University in Montreal claim that the growing influence of AI techniques in music has given rise to new aesthetic paradigms and, in particular, to the emergence of a deconstructivist aesthetic associated with reconstruction paradoxes, and a digital, combinatorial approach to music data. They trace this development back through recent trends, such as New Complexity and AI creativity, to post-1945 serialism, and argue that this evolution is the direct result of the integration of computer technology into the creative process.

Of course, supporting such multidisciplinarity in a journal also has its challenges. First, it means that there are few readers for whom everything published in the journal will be relevant to their interests. However, juxtaposing papers with contrasting topics and perspectives increases the chance of readers discovering new avenues of enquiry by chance. Second, it requires the editors to have access to a pool of experts with an especially broad range of expertise, which entails that the Journal must maintain good standing in a range of different disciplines relating to music. To this end, we aim over the coming year to strengthen and revise our editorial board in order to better reflect the current state of the art in a broad range of disciplines.

In the meantime, we hope that you enjoy this highly multidisciplinary double issue of the Journal of New Music Research!

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