Digital Tools for Music Analysis: a Critical Forum Series

When we flip open the front page of a book of manuscript paper, pen earnestly in hand or balanced nonchalantly behind an ear, we are interfacing with technology. The very acts of reading and writing music, or coaxing sound from a resonating body, are predicated on past technological revolutions – of print and instrument building. Music analysis was made possible by such upheavals; I propose that it might continue to draw life from such disruptions in the twenty-first century. Our upheavals, however, seem to be overwhelmingly digital; attendant worries abound. By outsourcing our music-analytical thinking to machines, will our core competencies atrophy? Could relying on algorithms encourage a Boolean view of analysis, minimising its fundamentally spectral nature? Furthermore, should not the core value of analysis be process rather than output – a means of mobilising the human imagination for non-instrumental ends? These questions will be vital for the humanities scholarship of the future, not least because of artificial intelligence – a wave which is already foaming angrily on the rocks. Another issue looms particularly large: technical competence as a barrier to entry. Even if a digital tool reveals itself to be non-dogmatic and analytically versatile, some are so complicated to use that music analysts without a background in computer science, or perhaps even without the gung-ho of plain old computer savvy, will possibly feel ill at ease: ‘How can I justify going into the woodshed to learn x program or to become au fait with y application when I have so many other demands on my time (REF meetings, teaching prep, and so on)?’ This new Critical Forum series, Digital Tools for Music Analysis, seeks to confront these problems head-on. Most academic journals publish research findings rather than how-to manuals. But what if new possibilities for research could be unlocked by such guides? And where better for researchers to learn about such new possibilities than in the journals which are the discipline's fundamental blood-pumping mechanism? As exemplified by Kenneth Smith's essay below, this series aims to introduce new analytical applications in a user-friendly way. More than that, however, it also aims to demonstrate how such programs might be leveraged to produce meaningful results ‘in the wild’. Having used various digital analytical tools myself, I strongly believe that the outputs of such systems must be interpreted with as much sensitivity as the scores or sound files themselves; they are not shortcuts to profundity, but instead make available different kinds of information. In other words, although said applications can speed some tasks up, such hare-brained outcomes obscure a deeper-level, more tortoise-minded point: when information is presented in new ways – by means which would ordinarily be too onerous for humans to compute manually – then new analytical topographies open up, to be traversed at leisure, with no pre-destined goal. I commissioned Kenneth Smith to write the series's first essay because he is an especially clear technology communicator, and because his Drive Analyzer has enriched both my teaching and my general musical thinking; I hope it will do the same for Music Analysis readers. Furthermore, there is a pleasing family resemblance between his work and the late Anthony Pople's Tonalities Project (Pople 2004), which was both similarly sensitive in its use of technology to solve complex analytical problems and similarly persuasive in its argument – still controversial in some quarters – that there is no hard line between tonality and atonality. As was the case 22 years ago, Music Analysis aims to be receptive to some of the discipline's most radical conceptual developments, as well as to the technologies which incubate them. Authors working on similar projects are invited to get in touch so that we might grow the series.