music21: Mapping the Eroica

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Mapping the Eroica

Alex Ross discusses on his blog a project by Eric Grunin to document changes in the performance of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony over the years. His visualization of changes in tempo in the first movement over time are particularly interesting:

(Red dots represent performances that take the repeat at the end of the exposition; blue dots do not).

Grunin finds all sorts of new and interesting data to analyze. I especially wanted to link to it to show that there is a lot of amazing projects in computer-aided musicology still to be done that do not require the use of analysis of music as symbolic data (as music21 does)

1 comment:

Eric GruninDecember 21, 2009 at 1:52 AM
Thank you for the kind words.

I created the site as a deliberate attempt to raise the standard of performance analysis: all the papers I could find used ridiculously small samples and/or obviously flawed logic.

I'm happy to observe that the challenge has been taken up, with such excellent results as The Mazurka Project (mazurka.org.uk).

Best of luck with music21! I would find such a tool very useful.

Regards,
Eric Grunin
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About music21

Music21 is a flexible toolkit for computer-aided musicology. The project is based at M.I.T. in the Music and Theater Arts section.

For more information, contact Michael Scott Cuthbert (cuthbert [at] mit.edu), principal investigator.

The music21 lab includes many top M.I.T. and Harvard undergraduate programmers. Music21 is sponsored by a grant from the Seaver Institute and the Digging into Data Challenge of the N.E.H..

This blog will discuss the music21 project, of course, but also highlight other interesting developments in computer-aided musicology by other researchers.

For more information and to download, visit the project website.