The Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH), located in the Braun Music Center, Stanford University, is concerned with the development of data resources and software applications for music research and allied areas of humanities study.
Its address is:
Braun #129
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-3076
tel. (650) 725-9240
fax (650) 725-9290
Web: http://www.ccarh.org/
Teaching
CCARH staffs a two-quarter graduate sequence, cross-listed with Computer Science:
| Music 253 | Introduction to Musical Information | http://www.stanford.edu/class/music253/ |
| Music 254 | Seminar in Music Representation | http://www.stanford.edu/class/music254/ |
This course sequence is team-taught by Eleanor Selfridge-Field and Walter B. Hewlett. The current teaching assistant is Craig Sapp.
Lab for Music Notation and Analysis
CCARH maintains a lab for applications in music notation, analysis, and sound sequencing. It also maintains some CD-ROM titles related to music research.
Currently supported third-party applications include:
| Notation software and fonts | ||
| Score | (Windows 9*) | notation and publishing |
|---|---|---|
| Finale | (Mac) | notation; MIDI capture and playback |
| Sibelius | (Windows) | notation; MIDI capture and playback |
| capella | (Windows) | notation; MIDI capture and playing; pedagogical applications |
| NoteWriter | (Mac) | notation (20th-century) |
| FinalScore | (Windows) | conversion from Finale to Score |
| St. Meinrad's | (Windows, Mac) | font for Gregorian chant |
| BachFont | (Windows) | font for musical symbols and symbol groups in text |
| ChordSymbol | (Windows) | font for analytical markup of scores |
| SmartScore | (Windows) | optical recognition |
| Analysis Software | ||
| Humdrum Toolkit | (Linux) | c.70 tools for data query, analysis, visualization, and playback |
| Sequencer Software | ||
| Cakewalk | (Windows) | MIDI capture, editing, playback, visualization |
| CD-ROMS | ||
| Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum | ||
| CANTUS | ||
| Zarlino: Tutte le opere | ||
| Thesaurus Linguae Graecae | ||
| PHI Latin Databases | ||
Research in Data Development, Access, and Query
Musedata is the host format. Client formats include
Themefinder (20,000 incipits)
Performing Materials
Publications
Computing in Musicology, ed. Walter B. Hewlett and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. Vols. 1-10 (CCARH): http://www.ccarh.org/publications/books/cm/
Melodic Similarity (= CM 11) (MIT Press, 1998): http://www.ccarh.org/publications/books/cm/vol/11/
CM 12: covering XML, NIFF, virtual editions, image reconstruction et al. (in progress)
The Musical Acoustics Research Library (MARL) is a collection of independent archives or libraries assembled by distinguished groups or individuals in the field of musical acoustics research. MARL is directed by representatives of each member collection, in conjunction with the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, which maintains the contents of each library. Currently, MARL is comprised of the Catgut Acoustical Society Library, the Arthur H. Benade Archive, the John Backus Archive, and the John W. Coltman Archive.
Background and History
The Musical Acoustics Research Library (MARL) has its origin in the vast acoustics research collection of the Catgut Acoustical Society (CAS). These files were assembled over many years by CAS and housed in the home of its founder Carleen M. Hutchins. In the late 1980s, CAS began an effort to establish an appropriate long-term residence for the collection, such that it could serve as a valuable reference source for the musical acoustics community at large. In 1992, the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University was selected as the repository for this library.
In conjunction with the establishment of the Catgut Acoustical Society Library, CCRMA and CAS encouraged the idea of having the personal archives of Arthur Benade and John Backus at the same site. Both were world leaders in the study of wind instrument acoustics. The personal files of John Backus were acquired in 1995. An agreement for the establishment of the Arthur H. Benade Archive at CCRMA was reached in 1997. In autumn 1996, representatives of CAS and CCRMA, together with Virginia Benade, established the Musical Acoustics Research Library at CCRMA in order to provide a single point of reference for the various collections. The most recent addition to MARL, the John W. Coltman Archive, was founded in April 1998. The archives of three of the most prominent wind instrument acousticians of our time, together with the extensive string instrument resources of the Catgut Acoustical Society Library, position MARL as a primary musical acoustics reference source in the world.
Organizational activities of MARL are directed by Gary P. Scavone, with faculty representation by Max V. Mathews and Chris Chafe, the director of CCRMA. MARL is a collective and each member/group representative is encouraged to take part in policy decisions. CCRMA, as an equal partner in MARL, is committed to helping establish the library as an important resource of musical acoustics knowledge for the entire global acoustics research community. A World Wide Web (WWW) site has been created for MARL, which will serve as the primary means for disseminating information to the public about the various collections.
Activities
The primary ongoing activities of MARL are centered on the development of a uniform databasing system to record the sub-collection catalogue information, as well as the creation of World Wide Web (WWW) pages for the dissemination of the library contents to the global musical acoustics community. The MARL WWW pages currently provide Internet access to overviews of the materials available at CCRMA. When requests for particular documents are received, those documents are being scanned and converted to Portable Document Format (PDF) files using Adobe Capture software and subsequently linked to appropriate locations within the MARL WWW pages. The files at CCRMA are also available for on-site perusal by appointment.
MARL activity is coordinated at CCRMA by Gary P. Scavone and organizational decisions are made by agreement among the representatives of each member collection. Activities are ongoing for the addition of new collections to MARL.
Web evolution has reached the point where it is now extremely attractive as a basis for educational infrastructure. Advantages of Web-based publications include
``Implications of the Web for Academic Publishing''
Another reason for the slow appearance of Web-based publication may be the time required to prepare documents for the Web. To address this issue, tools for conveniently managing online documents generated from LATEX are being developed. Current versions are described (and provided) in the online home page
``Tools for Publishing LaTeX Documents on the Web''Using these tools, publications may be generated automatically to the Web in HTML, PDF, and compressed PostScript formats. The footer of every HTML page includes a full bibliographic citation and hyperlinks for downloading either of the two hardcopy formats for printing. Thanks to latex2html, every page also contains ``navigation links'' (`next', `previous', `up', `contents', `index', and the like), which serve to orient the reader. These features are especially useful when a page is reached via a remote hyperlink, such as from a Web search engine.
When writing online documents, it is useful to draw upon a collection of links to related materials, so that the document will be well connected on the Web. To build such a collection, the beginnings of an online, interlinked ``knowledge base'' in the field of digital signal processing applied to music and audio is under development. The current state can be seen via the online index
``JOS Global Index''The Global Index was initially generated automatically as a list of links to all HTML pages under the JOS Home Page. As such, it functions as a kind of hypertext glossary for web-resident content in signal processing applied to music and audio, particularly for content resident at CCRMA.
A suitable subset of links from the JOS Global Index have been contributed to the Open Dictionary, which provides a means for researchers and educators in related fields to organize their respective links into one large ``meta-encyclopedia''.
In general, the best link targets tend to be ``Concept Home Pages'' (CHP) -- Web destinations devoted a single topic. Like any good ``hub'' on the Web, a CHP attempts to efficiently route all types of visitors to all types of content on the given topic. The topic is covered exhaustively in a top-down way, leveraging links to other CHPs as much as possible. The Digital Audio Resampling Home Page is a prototype CHP devoted to sampling-rate conversion. It presently consists of
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