Steinhardt, NYU Libraries Awarded Grant to Improve Access to Digital Music

By Timothy Farrell

Drawing on such diverse fields as information technology, machine learning, music theory, and cognition, a research project between the Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, and Human Development’s music technology program and NYU Libraries seeks to develop content-based approaches to the organization of, and access to, digital music archives. The three-year, $615,405 grant was awarded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), a federal agency.
    The project, “Improving Access to Digital Music Through Content-based Analysis,” promotes “the use of computational means for extending our comprehension and use of music data,” said Juan Bello, assistant professor of music and music education and principal investigator of the project. “The research initiatives in it have the potential to open endless possibilities for scientific, cultural, and commercial profit that can benefit consumers, music teachers, students, musicologists, and creators, and support the archiving and dissemination efforts of public libraries, music stores, content owners and radio stations.”
    The research project concentrates on encoding musical attributes, such as harmony and rhythm, to represent and characterize similarities that exist between songs and phrases, and showing how these methodologies can provide users with innovative modes of access to music. The project has the potential to increase the scalability and reduce the cost of music analysis and markup, while increasing access and dissemination of music in existing collections. These results can improve current practices in digital libraries, bolstering their ability to preserve and disseminate culture and enhance music education and research.
    “I strongly believe that music information retrieval can do for music and musicology what bioinformatics has done for the life sciences, namely, to dramatically increase the quantity, comprehension, and use of music information, while at the same time helping to advance the knowledge base of the disciplines involved,” said Bello.
    The partnership brings together the technical and scientific knowledge of music information retrieval researchers in Steinhardt’s music technology program and the expertise of NYU librarians at evaluating the needs of users accessing media collections.
    “The powerful searching and data mining capabilities that we have come to associate with text in digital libraries have not yet been extended to visual and audio media,” said Carol Mandel, dean of NYU Libraries.  “In undertaking this project, the music technology program is a leader in opening up new forms of access and research for music and realizing the rich potential of music in digital form.”