Wider Access and Benefit

Projects that most appeal to me are those that combine fundamental research with coherent plans for real, immediate, wider benefit. Fortunately, corpus study and computational approaches to music are ready made for this synthesis. This page highlights a few of the main projects and how I think that connection can work.

On this page:

Open Music Theory textbook and data-driven anthology
Crowd-soured collections, e.g., of CC0 score transcriptions with “OpenScore”

OMT

Open Music Theory is a free, born-digital, online textbook co-authored by several colleagues. I have so enjoyed being in this OMT-team, loved contributing (over 30 chapters), and am gratified to know that ~1.5 million people have benefitted from it already in ~3 years. This most directly connects with my research in the anthology section, notably:

On OMT	The Data	Research	Note
Harmony anthology	“When in Rome”	TISMIR 2023 and ISMIR 2023
Serial anthology	Serial_Analyser	Gotham and Yust 2021	That article (<) is free and open access when approached via this DLfM page

These analysis corpora complement (and often benefit from) the score corpora described below.

Collections

Since 2018 I’ve been driving projects create large collections of high-quality musical scores and release them freely so that anyone can able to play, download, transpose and use as they please copyright-free (under a CC0 license).

These project are in association with OpenScore and to date to offer two major collections of lieder (songs) and string quartets. For more information …

What?	Play online	Whole Corpus	Publication	Other
~1,300 songs	musescore.com	GitHub Mirror	Gotham and Jonas 2021, Gotham et al. 2018	Magazine piece, Coordination Spreadsheet
~100 quartets	musescore.com	GitHub Mirror	Gotham et al. 2023	Editorial notes, Coordination Spreadsheet

Finally, here’s an example from the lieder collection:

Schumann, Clara - Lieder, Op.12, No.4 - Liebst du um Schönheit on the OpenScore LiederCorpus main site