Schulich School of Music scholars among winners of Digging into Data Challenge

An international team of scholars led by Julie Cumming, Associate Dean of McGill’s Schulich School of Music, is among the winners of the second Digging into Data Challenge, a competition to promote innovative humanities and social-science research using large-scale data analysis.

The McGill-led team will use computers to examine the fundamental language of polyphonic Western classical music and how it changed between 1300 and 1900. It is one of 14 teams representing Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom and the Netherlands that have been awarded grants to investigate how computational techniques can be applied to "big data" to change the nature of humanities and social sciences research. Eight funding agencies from those four countries have banded together to sponsor the competition.

The research by the McGill team builds on recent changes in the way music is copied, stored and disseminated. While traditional musical scores aren’t searchable by computers, most music is now copied in computer formats, known as symbolic notation. Sophisticated software that can do nuanced queries of symbolic notation is also available.

The project team includes musicologists, music theorists, computer experts, and a librarian; six of the members are from McGill, one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one from Yale University, and two from the University of Aberdeen.

"For the first time we have large bodies of music in symbolic notation, search tools with which to query that music, and a team of scholars with massive musical and technical expertise," said Cumming, who is also a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT). "The combination will allow us to conduct fundamentally new evidence-based research into what polyphonic music is, how it works, and how it changes."

In the first round (2009) of the Digging into Data Challenge, the eight winning projects included one led by Ichiro Fujinaga of the Schulich School of Music. Fujinaga, a leading expert in the field of music information retrieval, is a member of Cumming’s team on the new project.

Total project funding for the second round is about US$4.8 million. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada is contributing CAN$869,117, which will support Canadian researchers from eight of the 14 winning teams.

For detailed descriptions of the winning projects, visit the SSHRC website at www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca

Additional information about the competition can be found at www.diggingintodata.org