technologies

major research projects
CoMposition, design, Mediation / ANALYSIS AND MEDIATION
MULTIMEDIA PUBLICATION TOOLS
FOR MUSICOLOGY
—
Team Involved: Analysis of Musical Practices
This work aims to experiment with, and in some cases,
standardize the original formats of multimedia publications
on music. One can argue that any analytic discourse on
music contains a potential ‘multimedia’ aspect, as it includes
a text (the oral commentary) and indicators for musical
information (e.g. citations of musical examples, references
to movements or passages in a work, etc.). Even so, it is
not until recently that musicologists became interested in
the new expressive possibilities of multimedia publication,
online and on other physical supports that were limited to
educational and cultural CD-ROMs until recently. We have
begun a two-step process in order to contribute to this
process.
Firstly, the experimentation carried out consists of
producing various musicological analyses in a multimedia
environment, specifying as we go along the environment
chosen according to the steps carried out in the analysis. This
experimentation materializes itself via the development of
analysis tools developed in collaboration with musicologists
(e.g. Charting the Score: A Tool for “Segmented Listening”
in collaboration with Jonathan Goldman) and also through
the publication of multimedia documents, on DVD-ROM
(such as those included in the Inouï, the IRCAM 2005 and
2006 journal) and in online magazines such as DEMeter
(Université de Lille-3) or Musimédiane—an audiovisual and
multimedia music analysis journal.
Secondly, using a process of comparison and abstraction
we will carry out a formalization of the analytic operations
brought into play. This enables standardization of
publication formats using text, sound, and image—not
only for the specific needs of musicologists, but also for
disciplines that are close to music publication found within
the institutional projects carried out at IRCAM (e.g. the
revamping of the Brahms database, the creation of the
IRCAM repertoire, software documentation). The issues
are those of documenting: using a well-defined format (to
facilitate the processing of the information) but one that is
not overly restrictive for others; joining visual and sonorous
musical excerpts together; making several types of
publication possible (online, a CD-ROM, a DVD-ROM, paper).
In order to do this, and given the sheer number of commands
involved by these projects, it is unfeasible to depend on
a manual layout of the data provided by authors for each
publication. A tool dedicated to these types of publications
must be used to integrate the aforementioned constraints.
This was the focus of our participation in ECOUTE (Authoring
environment for instrumental music listening, sound archive
management, and multi-support publication) supported by
the RIAM program and the RNTL Scenariplatform project.
The sum of these actions has already made it possible to
establish a publication format for musical analysis. This
format was first tested in a model of online classes for
the European project MusicWeb in 2003 and in a scientific
publication on the analysis of a performance in 2005. The
format was finally formalized with the production of a series
of CD-ROMs associated with the Musique Lab 2 project
featuring the Variationen op. 27 by Webern and Voi(rex)
by Philippe Leroux (2006-2007) as a part of an agreement
between IRCAM and the Provence Alpes Côte-d’Azur region.
These CD-ROMs offered two different ways to address the
work:
• The first introduces the work by letting the user read the
score as they are listening. The score was annotated with
a few contextual elements.
• The second offers several analytic points of view on the
work. Each position leads, via a hypermedia link, to key
passages in the score annotated by the author via the
Musique Lab Annotation software program. The contents
were produced entirely by the author using the Scenari-
CHAIN authoring tool and the Musique Lab software
package.
An interactive view of the Variationen op. 27 by Anton Webern (by
Emmanuel Ducreux with Nicolas Donin and Samuel Goldszmidt).
CD-ROM designed and published by IRCAM and the PACA Region
© 2007.
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