The Interactive Digital Transcription and Analysis Platform (IDTAP): Enabling the Computational and Heuristic Analysis of Sound, Music, and the Social

This paper outlines the historical background, motivation, development process, and potential impact of a new interactive digital transcription and analysis platform (IDTAP): The IDTAP is a web-based application that enables users to digitally transcribe, archive, share, and analyze audio recordings of oral melodic traditions. In 2023, authors and principal investigators Dard Neuman and Jon Myers launched version 1.0 of the platform, disseminated it globally, and cultivated an initial base of users. Whereas the platform has been built around Hindustani music (i.e., North Indian classical music), the principles, melodic contour archetypes, technologies, and methodologies behind the platform are designed to expand to other traditions where continuous melodic contour movements are accentuated. This expansion of the IDTAP, in turn, opens multiple recorded sound collections and archives to digital preservation, musical creation, as well as statistical, quantitative, and interpretive analysis, equipping scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds to apply the power of twenty-first-century computational methodologies and large datasets to humanistic endeavors.