Strengthening Interdisciplinarity in MIR: Four Examples of Using MIR Tools for Musicology
Aline Honingh, John Ashley Burgoyne, Peter van Kranenburg, Anja Volk

Abstract:
Music Information Retrieval (MIR) is a fundamentally interdisciplinary
field. Nonetheless, a number of presentations at previous ISMIR 
conferences have noted that there are some fields to which MIR 
seems to have a natural connection but with which there have been 
relatively fewer collaborations. Musicology is one of the most 
commonly cited fields where there are good opportunities for more 
interaction with MIR, and this paper presents four examples of 
using fundamental MIR concepts and software tools (the MIR and 
MIDI toolboxes) to start such collaborations. The four examples 
cover a wide range of musicological periods, from religious chant 
to 20th-century pop music, and also a wide range of MIR 
techniques, from concepts based on symbolic data to audio-only 
methods that avoid the concept of a musical score altogether. We 
hope that other researchers may extend or adapt our examples to 
answer their own musicological questions and foster their own 
collaborations between MIR and musicology.