Music in the digital age
[ Research Review 0809 : ]
By Katherine Smith
New software called MelodicMatch, designed for people who €œmake a living by understanding how music is put together€ is enabling researchers to formulate and identify musical patterns, and the relationships between them.
Developed in the C++ programming language by Philip Wheatland, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of the VCA and Music, MelodicMatch enables musicologists to make comparisons in large numbers of musical pieces that might not be possible manually.
Mr Wheatland, a Melbourne music and education graduate, spent three years teaching secondary school music before crossing over into IT. While working as a programmer, he became aware of the possibilities of computer-based musical analysis of this type, and set about to create a suitable application.
€œMelodicMatch is not for the average music buff, but could become a valuable tool for musicologists, composers, and people who edit music or put together new editions of printed music,€ he says.
Mr Wheatland€™s doctoral thesis involves several case studies of the successful practical application of the software.
Dr Jan Stockigt, a musicologist at the School of Music (Parkville), has been working on the music of Dresden in the 1730s, a golden age for music that saw a great flourishing of opera and song.
Mr Wheatland explains that in that period, composers would often have a particular singer in mind when writing new music, but this is not necessarily documented.
MelodicMatch is helping to match specific singers to individual pieces, thereby shedding new light on the intricate inter-relationships of composers, musicians, singers and courtly patronage of the first Augustan age.
€œThe analysis can€™t be absolutely conclusive, but can provide additional information to build the body of evidence that musicologists draw from,€ he says.
€œI have also been analysing very early music from the sixteenth century, and the software is proving useful in isolating particular structures of music from that time which might otherwise escape detection.
€œThe unique quality of MelodicMatch is that is can present results in a highly visual manner.
€œIts presentation complements traditional music notation by enabling music researchers to see the outline of a large-scale piece and to throw into relief the relationships between melodies, rhythms and lyrics.
€œIn the hands of a skilled analyst, MelodicMatch can also help to reveal the compositional processes that are common to a collection of works.€
Philip Wheatland (BMus, BMusEd 1991) is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of the VCA and Music. MelodicMatch is available commercially via the University of Melbourne€™s Curriculum Licensing Services. The software is described fully at www.melodicmatch.com.Contact: pskw@iinet.net.au
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