Expressive Musical Performance for Musicological Listening Analysis (Land Sachsen-Anhalt)
Conventional musicological anaysis techniques are often limited by practical, financial, and personnel conditions. Big musical corpora cannot be opened up and treated adequately. Neither musicians nor studio equipment are sufficiently available to produce and evaluate various performances of compositions in proper style for contrastive listening; historical performance situations (with respect to instrumentation and acoustics) are not easily reconstructable, etc.
Although the human musician cannot and should not be replaced, as we believe, it is possible to simulate a lot of aspects of the expressive performance by computational models. This opens up the musicologically and psychologically interesting opportunity to detect, evaluate, and reconstruct stylistic characteristics and change processes.
In cooperation with musicologists of the “Zentrum für Telemannpflege und -Forschung Magdeburg” (Magdeburgian Center for Telemann Care and Research) and the Magdeburgian research group for Data and Knowledge Engeneering we are developing software tools to contribute to the modernization of musicological analysis, especially the listening analysis.