Assisted Music Analysis

The use of computers, and of the science of informatics in general, has penetrated into many fields of study related to music. One of the most important fields amongst these is the study of the musical object itself, i.e. music analysis. Computer assisted music analysis is becoming more and more widespread, as computers can cope with extensive amounts of data, do comparative analyses of large musical corpora, and formalise the analytical process so that there are no gaps or hidden steps in the procedure. More specifically, computers are particularly good at categorising musical works, or musical segments, and at finding repeated patterns that occur in one or more works. Computer assisted music analysis forms part of the larger field of computational musicology, and has close links with the area of music information retrieval (MIR). Perhaps the most interesting challenge in this enterprise is to combine the objectivity and scientific rigour of informatics with the interpretative nature of music analysis.