Digital Audio Processing Tools for Music Corpus Studies
Johanna Devaney · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023
Abstract Digital audio processing tools offer music researchers the opportunity to examine both non-notated music and music as performance. This chapter summarizes the types of information that can be extracted from audio as well as currently available audio tools for music corpus studies. The survey of extraction methods includes both a primer on signal processing and background theory on audio feature extraction. The survey of audio tools focuses on widely used tools, including both those with a graphical user interface, namely Audacity and Sonic Visualiser, and code-based tools written in the C/C++, Java, MATLAB, and Python computer programming languages. This survey considers both the potential and limitations of digital audio processing tools. In the near term, these tools may not be able to replace human annotation of audio entirely. However, even with some annotation error, the studies of large corpora of audio recordings facilitated by computational methods offer opportunities to advance music research in significant ways.