Quick Description

The Basic Problem

For centuries, music scholars have researched counterpoint as one of the fundamental elements of Western music. With the advent of computer-driven music analysis, most analytic efforts have been based on melody or harmony—two equally-important musical elements. Now is the time for counterpoint to catch up.

Equipped with Schubert and Cumming's “contrpuntal modules”, Myke Cuthbert's music21 library for Python, the Perl/Humdrum software collection, and a growing set of online repositories of symbolic musical data, the ELVIS team has set out to bring an empirical basis to music theoretic conjecturing about counterpoint.

Funding

ELVIS started in earnest when we received one of 14 Digging into Data Challenge awards in the 2011 competition. Funded jointly by several international funding organizations (like SSHRC from Canada and JISC from the United Kingdom), Digging into Data asks participating teams to use “big data” techniques in their humanities research projecs. For the ELVIS team, this means coming to terms with 600 years of recorded Western music in the form of vertical interval successions.

The Research Team

As with all Digging into Data projects, the ELVIS team comprises several international teams. We have team members working at:

• McGill University (Montréal, Canada)

  The largest by number of participants, the Montréal ELVIS team includes professors Julie Cumming, Peter Schubert, Ichiro Fujinaga, René Rusch, Jon Wild, and Cynthia Leive. Refer also to our list of student contributors.

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Boston, United States)

  The MIT team is responsible for the music21 software library used by the other teams, developed by Myke Cuthbert.

• Yale University (New Haven, United States)

  Focussing on the harmonic side of counterpoint, the Yale team is led by Ian Quinn.

• University of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, Scotland)

  Using their pre-existing tools to answer new questions with larger corpora, the Aberdeen team includes Frauke Jürgensen and George Coghill, plus Ian Knopke from the BBC. View their website at symbolicmusic.org.

Our Work

Each team has made their own contribution to the ELVIS project's overall project. The McGill team has collected a repository of symbolic musical scores with carefully-selected metadata, developed a framework for music analysis programs, and will soon deploy a Web-based application for analyzing contrapuntal modules.

The MIT team has been working hard to furnish new functionality for music21 that eases analysis of large musical collections, increasing stability and efficiency along the way.

The Yale team has furnished the database with a sizeable collection of 18th- and 19th-century music while performing important statistical work that may call into question aspects of our received knowledge of harmony.

Finally, the Aberdeen team has been answering questions about stylistic differences between similar composers by combining symbolic research with perception-and-cognition testing.

Of course, all teams have presented at professional conferences, and are preparing numerous scholarly publications.