Computational ethnomusicology: a music information retrieval perspective

Computational ethnomusicology (CE) refers to the use of computational techniques for the study of musics from around the world. It has been a growing field that has benefited from the the many advances that have been made in music information retrieval (MIR). The historical development of CE and the types of tasks that have been addressed so far, is traced in this paper. The use of computational techniques enables types of analysis and processing that would be either impossible or very hard to perform using only audio recordings and human listening. The small but growing subset of music cultures that have been investigated is also overviewed. Research in computational ethnomusicology is still at early stage and the engagement of musicologists and musicians is still limited. The paper ends with interesting directions for future work and suggestions for how to engange musicologists and musicians. The material presented formed the basis of an invited talk by the author presented at the 2014 joint International Computer Music/Sound and Music Computing conference in Athens, Greece, 2014.