CosmoNote is the citizen science platform of the ERC project COSMOS. The citizen science studies are led by Daniel Bedoya, the platform is designed by Lawrence Fyfe, and the perception analytics performed by Corentin Guichaoua. Elaine Chew is Principal Investigator of the COSMOS project.
CosmoNote is a web-based annotation interface that allows participants to explore the vast musical universe by listening to, and annotating structures found in, performed music. Through CosmoNote, citizen scientists can enjoy listening to music and learning about the ways in which performers shape music and influence the ways in which they hear the music while helping researchers understand how musical structures are transformed, created, and shaped in music performance.
COSMOS focuses on structures created in music performance, i.e., those which arise from the decisions and actions of the performer. See the videos on Prosodic elements in music.
CosmoNote was created to study structures created and shaped in music performance. Computer algorithms have had limited success at finding these structures automatically, but humans may perceive these structures more easily. Hence, we call on citizen scientists to find or discover the structures listeners perceive in performed music. CosmoNote contributors will use their natural abilities to think flexibly and reason about what they hear to solve complex problems about musical structures in performance.
The lifecycle of CosmoNote data
In CosmoNote, performances are recorded in both discrete event-based and continuous signal-based data formats. Features are extracted from the recorded data, and visualized in information layers in the CosmoNote interface. Interaction tools in CosmoNote enable citizen scientists to produce markups of the performed structures, and the results prepared for analysis.
CosmoNote currently focuses on classical piano music of the common practice era in the Western tradition. We have access to a large database of digitized piano rolls of Legendary artists, recordings from current artists playing a diverse repertoire, and a set of new recordings specially created for use in CosmoNote.
Two performances of the Chopin's Sonata Op.58-1. Scanned piano roll from the SUPRA archives (left), MIDI file in CosmoNote (right).Notes (horizontal axis) vs Time (vertical axis)
MIDI and audio recordings can be captured at source, and audio recordings can also be created from existing MIDI collections of expert performances using a Bösendorfer 280VC ENSPIRE PRO, a reproducing piano, in a recording studio at IRCAM. This allows us to have both discrete event-based information as well as continuous signal data of the performed music.
