Information Sources for Music Informatics Courses
Donald Byrd, Fall 2006
I intend the following list of information sources particularly as a basis for research for projects for my courses, but it should be useful for other purposes as well. Depending on what you're studying, several types of information sources are likely to be useful: technical literature and web sites, software, and music collections. Or you may just need general technical background.
Music Informatics Literature and Web Sites
For music-IR and related topics, my own music-IR bibliography is fairly up-to-date, but it's strongly focused on my own interests. While there's a more complete and less biased music-IR "research bibliography" at http://www.music-ir.org/research_home.html, as of this writing, it's years out-of-date, and I see no signs it's going to be updated any time soon. Also, I'm suspicious of whether its search feature works properly, so be careful. ISMIR is the "International Conference on Music Information Retrieval". A complete list of all ISMIR papers is available at http://www.ismir.net/all-papers.html; it's exceptionally useful because it includes links to complete copies of most of the papers.
Don't neglect the short but sweet I590 Reserve List.
The most relevant journals are probably Computer Music Journal, Journal of New Music Research, the non-academic Electronic Musician, and perhaps Music Perception, Computers and the Humanities, and the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. The most relevant conference proceedings are likely the International Conference on Music Information Retrieval, International Computer Music Conference, Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval, and perhaps the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, IJCAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Music, and the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries.
Finally, my home page has a number of links that should be useful; see especially the "Professional Links" at the bottom left.
Software and Systems
Paul Lamere's excellent The Tools We Use says "Since October 2004, I have been surveying the MIR community as to what tools MIR researchers were using. I have compiled this list based upon the inputs of MIR researchers from around the world."
Music Collections in Encoded Form
The MIREX web site hosts a number of very useful test collections, but it may not be easy to find them! My own list of Candidate Music IR Test Collections should be useful, though it's somewhat out-of-date, and maintaining it is low priority since the advent of MIREX. Finally, there's a small collection of MIDI files plus very simple text versions of the notes in them at Chris Raphael's I546 web page; however, I don't know how long he plans to leave them there, so check with him before depending on them.
Technical Background
For background information on music information technology, including computer technology in general, I recommend the following books:
Brinkman's book is less helpful for beginning R programmers than in might be because the PASCAL language looks quite different from R, but it actually has a lot in common; the biggest difference is probably that PASCAL has no built-in capability for doing things with arrays or vectors in a single statement. Besides, a great deal of the book is on principles of processing music by computer that apply equally well to any programming language.
Of course, books aren't the only source of background information. IU's own Cook Music Library web site has extensive links to useful information about music, including online reference works. And many of the Wikipedia articles on all of these topics are quite good, though some are not. Electronic Musician has a regular feature, "Square One", addressed to musicians with no technical background, that covers a different topic each month in a couple of pages; the ones I've read through have been well-written and accurate.
For R programming, there's a lot of documentation on the Comprehensive R Archive Network website; to get to it, use the links near the bottom of the column at the left, under "Documentation". I particularly recommend "An Introduction to R", a well-organized guide available in both HTML and PDF form from the "Manuals" page.
On the musical side, if you need to know more about music theory, there's a very good music-theory website, Ricci Adams' musictheory.net. It uses Macromedia Flash to offer lessons, trainers and utilities on music theory. (Thanks to Zhuofeng Li for finding this.) Also, my music-IR bibliography lists several books on basic music theory, including textbooks and a "complete idiot's guide".