Strengthening Interdisciplinarity in MIR: Four Examples of Using MIR Tools for Musicology

Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a fundamentally interdisciplinary
field. Nonetheless, a number of presentations
at previous ISMIR conferences have noted that there
are some fields to which MIR seems to have a natural connection
but with which there have been relatively fewer
collaborations. Musicology is one of the most commonly
cited fields where there are good opportunities for more interaction
with MIR, and this paper presents four examples
of using fundamental MIR concepts and software tools (the
MIR and MIDI toolboxes) to start such collaborations. The
four examples cover a wide range of musicological periods,
from religious chant to 20th-century pop music, and
also a wide range of MIR techniques, from concepts based
on symbolic data to audio-only methods that avoid the concept
of a musical score altogether. We hope that other
researchers may extend or adapt our examples to answer
their own musicological questions and foster their own collaborations
between MIR and musicology.