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Project Details
Description
Funded by the AHRC Curiosity programme, this project will determine the scale and feasibility for developing a bespoke toolset (Tape Archive Analysis Toolkit – TAAT) that can analyse large audio datasets derived from analogue sources to aid researchers in determining new musicological insights and archives in effectively cataloguing and deriving meaning from their digital collections.
The team from the University of Huddersfield has worked on two previous AHRC funded research projects which have produced over 400 hours of digitised audio files from reel-to- reel tape archives of historical electronic music composers from England. These materials cover final versions of compositions as well as working materials, intermediate materials, intermediate mixes, draft recordings, and pre-existing works from other composers or radio broadcasts. The network of relationships posed by these recordings are vast and potentially of great value to musicologists, archives, and libraries in developing new insights and communicating musical histories to the public. However, the quantity of material is beyond the scope of an individual to meaningfully make sense of. To effectively engage with this material, a bespoke toolset is needed to analyse this collection of audio and determine:
1. Where there are relationships between segments of audio files, and
2. What the differences are between two related audio recordings
The TAAT will address these questions and find new strategies for recognising relationships between digitised audio files. Over 12 months of dedicated development, a number of approaches will be implemented and tested – including signal comparison within the time and frequency domain, Music Information Retrieval analysis, and neural networks – using materials from the existing large audio databases in the Roberto Gerhard and Ernest Berk tape archives. Methods will be tested and modified in order to ascertain the most effective path forward to develop new processes for the analysis of large audio archives derived from analogue sound sources. The project team will include a musicologist who will apply the TAAT to new contexts and provide feedback to the project team.
This project will act as a trial for the development of future research in both digital archive management and the creation of new musicological knowledge in the field of England’s electronic music history and to make sense of the masses of recorded materials in archive collections around the world.
The team from the University of Huddersfield has worked on two previous AHRC funded research projects which have produced over 400 hours of digitised audio files from reel-to- reel tape archives of historical electronic music composers from England. These materials cover final versions of compositions as well as working materials, intermediate materials, intermediate mixes, draft recordings, and pre-existing works from other composers or radio broadcasts. The network of relationships posed by these recordings are vast and potentially of great value to musicologists, archives, and libraries in developing new insights and communicating musical histories to the public. However, the quantity of material is beyond the scope of an individual to meaningfully make sense of. To effectively engage with this material, a bespoke toolset is needed to analyse this collection of audio and determine:
1. Where there are relationships between segments of audio files, and
2. What the differences are between two related audio recordings
The TAAT will address these questions and find new strategies for recognising relationships between digitised audio files. Over 12 months of dedicated development, a number of approaches will be implemented and tested – including signal comparison within the time and frequency domain, Music Information Retrieval analysis, and neural networks – using materials from the existing large audio databases in the Roberto Gerhard and Ernest Berk tape archives. Methods will be tested and modified in order to ascertain the most effective path forward to develop new processes for the analysis of large audio archives derived from analogue sound sources. The project team will include a musicologist who will apply the TAAT to new contexts and provide feedback to the project team.
This project will act as a trial for the development of future research in both digital archive management and the creation of new musicological knowledge in the field of England’s electronic music history and to make sense of the masses of recorded materials in archive collections around the world.
Short title | Tape Archive Analysis Toolset |
---|---|
Acronym | TAAT |
Status | Active |
Effective start/end date | 1/02/25 → 31/01/26 |
Projects
- 1 Active
-
Ernest Berk: An Expressionist Outsider
Adkins, M., Gillies, S. & Helliwell, I.
1/10/23 → 31/01/27
Project: Research