A Toolkit for Live Annotation of Opera Performance: Experiences Capturing Wagner's Ring Cycle

Performance of a musical work potentially provides a rich source of multimedia material for future investigation, both for musicologists’ study of reception and perception, and in improvement of computational methods applied to its analysis. This is particularly true of music theatre, where a traditional recording cannot sufficiently capture the ephemeral phenomena unique to each staging. In this paper we introduce a toolkit developed with, and used by, a musicologist throughout a complete multi-day production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. The toolkit is centred on a tablet-based score interface through which the scholar makes notes on the scenic setting of the performance as it unfolds, supplemented by a variety of digital data gathered to structure and index the annotations. We report on our experience developing a system suitable for real-time use by the musicologist, structuring the data for reuse and further investigation using semantic web technologies, and of the practical challenges and compromises of fieldwork within a working theatre. Finally we consider the utility of our tooling from both a user perspective and through an initial quantitative investigation of the data gathered.