New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies
Dr Cravinho is a Co-Investigator in the New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies research project, which brings together musicologists, computer scientists, and archivists to develop artificial intelligence, music information retrieval tools, and archival workflows to enhance access to archival jazz collections.
This grant is one of eight major awards from the newly established partnership between the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). These AHRC/NEH New Directions for Digital Scholarship in Cultural Institutions grants will help promote digital tools for scholars and researchers in the humanities.
The New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies project will use algorithms to lead automated transcriptions and melodic pattern analysis of audio collections in jazz archives and artificial intelligence to enhance digital research capabilities and facilitate access to new audio recordings held by archives not circulated widely as commercial releases. By linking audio information to other archival materials related to the music and musicians – texts, images, ephemera – the team hopes to give the jazz world new tools offering a mutual benefit to jazz archives and jazz scholars.
In addition, the methods and tools will apply to musicology and digital humanities in general. These will open new research frontiers, advance collections-based research methods for the 21st century, and access archives for academic and non-academic users.
Project Title: New Directions in Digital Jazz Studies: Music Information Retrieval and AI Support for Jazz Scholarship in Digital Archives
Start date: February 2021
Duration of the grant: 30-months
Project team:
Prof Gabriel Solis (Principal Investigator), University of Illinois, US
Dr Tillman Weyde (Principal Investigator), City, University of London, UK
Dr Pedro Cravinho (Co-Investigator), Birmingham City University, UK
Adriana Cuervo (Co-Investigator), Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers, Newark, US
Prof Simon Dixon (Co-Investigator), Queen Mary University of London, UK
Dr Haftor Medboe (Co-Investigator), Edinburgh Napier University, UK
Project partners:
Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University–Newark
Scottish Jazz Archive.