Journal of New Music Research - Special issue on Computational Ethnomusicology

LATEST NEWS (June 19th): Deadline extension:

• There will be an extension to the deadline until July 10th.
• Preliminary submission: Notwithstanding the deadline, authors should submit by June 20th the title of the paper, the author list, and a preliminary abstract.

Since the beginning of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) as a field, most of its models and technologies have been developed for mainstream popular music in the so-called “Western” tradition. The term Western is generally employed to denote most of the cultures of European origin and most of their descendants.
Over the last few years, there has been an increasing interest in applying available techniques to the study of traditional, folk or ethnic music. Ethnomusicologists, music theorists and practitioners, among others, could be considerably benefit from this research.
Although computational techniques have been proved to be of great interest when applied to different musical repertoires, it is apparent that we need to develop culture-specific techniques and algorithms to understand, model, and process different music repertoires.
In order to gather relevant, high-quality research on computational methods and applications in ethnomusicology, the prestigious Journal of New Music Research will host a Special Issue on Computational Ethnomusicology to appear in 2013.

Topics

We invite contributions describing the use of computational tools to model ethnic, folk or traditional music repertoires, including, but not limited to:

• Music transcription and notation.
• Music signal processing.
• Intonation, melody and motives.
• Harmony, tonality, scale analysis.
• Rhythm, tempo, rhythmic patterns.
• Timbre, instrumentation and voice.
• Music similarity.
• Performance analysis.
• Emotion and aesthetics.
• Genre, style and mood.
• Libraries, archives and digital collections.
• Evaluation and annotation issues.
• Preservation and restoration of historical recordings.
• Culture- specific taxonomies and ontologies.

Submissions must pose and describe the music problem thoroughly, a deep account of the methods employed, and a comprehensive and critical evaluation of results. Authors can use any musical representation (e.g. symbolic or audio data) for their studies.

Submissions

Submissions must follow the style and formatting guidelines of the Journal of New Music Research, and must be submitted through the Journal's Manuscript Central Site (not to the editors directly) at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nnmr. On the Manuscript Type menu, authors should indicate "SI – Computational Ethnomusicology".

Submissions should be roughly 6,000 words in length. This corresponds roughly to 16 pages using latex fullpage/12pt/a4paper/doublespacing. To be considered for the Special Issue, submissions must be received no later than June 20th, 2012.

 

Important dates

• June 20, 2012 deadline for manuscript submission
• October 5, 2012 responses to authors
• December 5, 2012 camera ready papers due
• June 2013 Special Issue in print

Questions and queries regarding the suitability of topics/research to the Special Issue should be directed to the Guest Editors:

• Emilia Gómez (emilia.gomez@upf.edu) and Perfecto Herrera (perfecto.herrera@upf.edu) Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and
Sonology Department, Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain.
• Francisco Gómez (fmartin@eui.upm.es), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid