On Automated Annotation of Acousmatic Music
Volkmar Klien, Thomas Grill, Arthur Flexer · Journal of New Music Research · 2012
This paper presents an inquiry concerning the feasibility of using existing methods from the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) for automated annotation of acousmatic music. Thorough discussion and appraisal of the meaning and role of annotation in this context leads to our conclusion that: (i) full automation is not possible due to the lack of a ‘ground truth’ and the absence of semantic comprehension on the side of the computer, (ii) MIR can nevertheless play a valuable role by providing human annotators with tools for interactive annotation. We present two possible approaches to interactive annotation applied to compositions of acousmatic music, namely John Chowning's Turenas and Denis Smalley's Wind Chimes. We also discuss the potential impact of such semi-automatic annotation on the theoretical consideration and practice of acousmatic music.