Musicology, Mind Palaces and Machines

No artistic or creative act in the present would be possible without the events and backdrop of the past, which is only accessible afterward by way of memory. Numerous techniques like the method loci (mind palaces) for structuring memory for future access have been developed over the past 2,000 years. Perceptions of connectivity with the musical, social and personal forerunners are especially and explicitly more intense in opera than other forms of art music. Both creators (composers, librettists, performers, producers, etc.) and consumers (audiences, critics, scholars) in operatic spaces predicate their actions in the moment of performance on how they understand and thus relate to previous praxes. How performers and audience members construct notions of performance traditions in a given work has heretofore been represented through prose and notation. To these discursive methods, the CHARM Mazurka Project added data-based methods of hierarchical data structuring and visualization through Time Scapes. Additional prior work adapted these images for use with texted music, which in turn were used to identify relationships between production design and performance practice. This essay builds on these methods in order to analyse individual, highly charged dramatic moments in the ‘Riddle scene’ from Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, first in how they shape the narrative onstage and then in relationship to other performances and performers. Finally, these entities and relations are situated in spatially-organized similarity network diagrams, providing data-based and digitally-enabled cartographs of performance histories that function as memory construction aids