By Tim Crawford
The Transforming Musicology team was in much evidence at last
week's performances of Richard Wagner's Ring
Cycle at the Birmingham Hippodrome (5-9
November). With the invaluable support of the Hippodrome, we
have been able to capture physical data from at least seven
participants for each opera, six of whom valiantly attended all
four operas - a total of some 15 hours! Seated together in
excellent seats in row K, they were able to enjoy the full
operatic experience, which, to judge by their comments we heard
in the intervals and after each show, was pretty intense. The
Shimmer3
devices each wore on a wrist seem to have performed perfectly,
and don't seem to have become uncomfortable, even over the
two-hour stretches of the longest acts. These measured three
basic types of data: galvanic
skin response (GSR), heart rate (HR), and their
micro-movements in three dimensions.
read more...
By David Baker
If Richard Wagner were to have known before he died that some
scientists in the future would create a psychometric tool to measure
the "Wagnerism" in a given individual, would he be flattered or
appalled? It's a strange question, but it's a question you could ask
since that's what we have been working on here on the Transforming
Musicology project.
read more...
By David Baker
It's hard to hear anything mentioned about the music of Richard
Wagner without also hearing someone mention the word
'leitmotif'. Leitmotifs, if you are unfamiliar with the term,
are small, dynamic musical ideas that are associated with a
person, place, idea, or feeling. These leitmotifs undergo many
different transformations throughout Wagner's operas and most
importantly, contribute to the dramatic narrative. While this
may be common knowledge to most musicologists, how different
groups of people actually experience these leitmotifs has
remained very unexplored in much of the academic literature.
read more...
By Richard Lewis
One of Transforming Musicology's core musicological work
packages addresses the leitmotive technique of Richard
Wagner. In this work we are applying a mixed disciplines
approach comprising: humanistic literature study of the ways the
leitmotives have been identified and discussed since the operas'
first performances up to the present; computational audio
similarity experiments to find known leitmotives and potential
leitmotive candidates; and pyschological listening tests of
participants with a range of Wagner experience to understand how
they hear the operas and the leitmotives.
read more...
