Improving the Discoverability of UK HPC User Documentation for New Users

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026-02-23

Improving the Discoverability of UK HPC User Documentation for New Users

Open MIND · 2026-02-23

Choosing, Using, and Building Effective Software Tools for Research with Symbolic Music Corpora

Oxford University Press eBooks · 2025-06-24

Abstract For a software tool to be useful for musical corpus studies, it should expose symbolic musical data, however it is stored, as a set of musically meaningful software abstractions; and support the batch manipulation of more than one piece of music with the help of these abstractions, preferably on the order of hundreds or thousands. In this chapter, the author explores the landscape of toolkits for analysis of symbolic corpora, including Humdrum and music21. In addition to providing a historical background to these tools, the author explores a number of use cases and introductory approaches to how to get started with each. Finally, the author discusses issues of maintainability and best practice in relation to research software.

Exploring Time-Coded Comments on YouTube Music Videos of ‘Top 40’ Pop 2000–20

2023-01-01

As part of a larger project to understand the way that structural features of the design and implementation of radio technology influences its audiences – calling this the medium’s ‘physiognomy’ – Theodor Adorno opened the mailbags of the radio stations he was studying and a torrent of ‘fan mail’ flooded out.[1] Adorno argued that listeners’ ‘feedback’, their obsequious suggestions for change to the station’s music programmers (whom he accused of the standardization of sound culture as he knew it), masked a desire to assume the position of radio management, despite their apparent antagonism towards it.[2] Their letters reveal the contradictions that inhere in audience feedback and, usefully, often take music as their starting point. If, as Martin Scherzinger suggests, Adorno’s model of technological critique is robust enough to support a new ‘software physiognomy’, readers interested in the relationship between online audiences, digital media technology, music and mass culture would do well to turn to YouTube: both a top-flight distributor of music in the twenty-first century and a lively forum for user-generated discussion about music and musical culture, hosted in its notorious comment section.[3] Here, I explore the intersection of these two functions of this platform. This is possible because YouTube has, since 2008, allowed users to easily create links that navigate directly to a given fragment of an online video: the website detects text comments that resemble valid time codes and renders each time code as a clickable hyperlink. The link skips the user directly to the moment in the video cited and (optionally) starts 256playback at that point. These time-coded hyperlinks (e.g. ‘0:45 is my favorite part!!’) are also sometimes called ‘deep links’, because they use the structure of URLs to refer to ‘deep’ within the resource referenced by the hyperlink. Here are some examples of time-coded comments on music videos, all released in 2017:
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\nOn a lyric video for The Chainsmokers and Coldplay, ‘Something Just Like This’ (2017): ‘The melody at 3:34 Shouldn’t be underestimated because thats my favourite part and i repeat many times’
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\nOn a video for ZAYN ft. Sia, ‘Dusk to Dawn’ (2018): ‘If you wanna repeat the best high note of this masterpiece: 5:15’
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\nOn a video for Taylor Swift, ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ (2017): ‘If u play the song at x2 speed, listen to the background music in the chorus it sounds like a snake rattling 2:06 – 2:19 3:06 – 3:19 3:22 - 3:35’
\n
\nIn this chapter, I examine comments like this; following Raynor Vliegendhart et al., I call them time-coded comments (TCCs).[4] I first describe the historical background to TCCs on the Web and their use to date as a source for musicology. Then, I summarize their use in a large (over 1 million) set of TCCs responding to about 200 popular music videos on YouTube, with the help of a computational text analysis technique called topic modelling. This shows the variety of uses of TCCs by listeners on YouTube and paints a portrait of listening practices during this period which make use of the technological affordances of the platform, what might be called the platform’s software physiognomy. I also examine some non-normative uses of these comments, which push against the prevailing interaction types afforded by YouTube. Finally, I sketch the problems with and potential futures for the use of this kind of information by digital musicologists and other students of online musical culture.

Confronting ethical and social issues related to the genetics of musicality

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2023-02-27 · 20 citations

New interdisciplinary research into genetic influences on musicality raises a number of ethical and social issues for future avenues of research and public engagement. The historical intersection of music cognition and eugenics heightens the need to vigilantly weigh the potential risks and benefits of these studies and the use of their outcomes. Here, we bring together diverse disciplinary expertise (complex trait genetics, music cognition, musicology, bioethics, developmental psychology, and neuroscience) to interpret and guide the ethical use of findings from recent and future studies. We discuss a framework for incorporating principles of ethically and socially responsible conduct of musicality genetics research into each stage of the research lifecycle: study design, study implementation, potential applications, and communication.

Confronting ethical and social issues related to the genetics of musicality

2022-05-13 · 3 citations

New interdisciplinary research into genetic influences on musicality raises a number of ethical and social issues for future avenues of research and public engagement. The historical intersection of music cognition and eugenics heightens the need to vigilantly weigh potential risks and benefits of these studies and use of their outcomes. Here we bring together diverse perspectives (complex trait genetics, music cognition, musicology, bioethics, and neuroscience) to guide ethical use of this new knowledge. We discuss a framework for incorporating principles of ethically and socially responsible conduct of musicality genetics research into each stage of the research lifecycle: study design, study implementation, potential applications, and communication about the research.

Interleaving as Cultural Technique in the Audio CD and the End of Archaeophonography

Media theory. · 2021-09-25

This article discusses a significant if imperceptible feature of how audio compact discs (CDs) inscribe sound: interleaving. It shows how CDs materialize interleaving—the microtemporal re-ordering of data—as a cultural technique of contemporary digital media, and, as such, how the CD’s surface testifies to much more general operations of cultural data processing than those that appear to be at stake in the few media-theoretical discussions of the format to date. First, I provide a brief overview of the CD’s operating principles, followed by a closer examination of the error-correction and detection system used in CD media. I explain how interleaving co-operates with this system to improve the resilience of disc media to both pre-sale defect and post-sale damage. I interpret this tacit and little-remarked-upon operation of CD players in cultural-technical terms. The perplexities of digital sound media push the principles of contemporary sound reproduction well beyond the kind of efficient and effective critical scrutiny we may associate with what I here call archaeophonographic sound media (for example, tape and vinyl LPs), unless we are willing to confidently assert the value of the media-technical explanatory register to digital media history.

Cybernetics, Listening, and Sound-Studio Phenomenotechnique in Abraham Moles’s <i>Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique</i> (1958)

Resonance The Journal of Sound and Culture · 2021-01-01 · 1 citations

In his Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958), the sociologist of culture Abraham Moles (1920–92) set out to demonstrate the applicability of information theory—a mathematical linchpin of cybernetics—to the arts more generally. Moles drew on classical psychophysics, Gestalt psychology, more modern behavioral psychology, and contemporary psychoacoustic research to advocate a cybernetic model of the perception and creation of art. Moles repeatedly returned to musical examples therein to make his case, leveraging his dual expertise in philosophy and electroacoustics, drawing on formative experiences with Pierre Schaeffer in Paris and Hermann Scherchen at his Gravesano studio. Moles’s interdisciplinary text found many attentive readers across Europe and, following an English translation by the precocious Joel E. Cohen (1966), the Anglophone academic world, but it was valued more as an inspiration for the burgeoning area of “information aesthetics” than as a source of hard scientific evidence. Drawing lightly on positions in the history and philosophy of science articulated by Gaston Bachelard (who supervised Moles’s second PhD, in philosophy) and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger suggests a change of emphasis away from its apparent scientific infelicities and toward Moles’s use of sound-studio technique, which is described with reference to the technologies available to Moles in the years leading up to the publication of the Théorie. Moles manipulated and processed sound recordings—filtering, clipping, and reversing them—in his attempts to empirically estimate the relative proportions of semantic and aesthetic information in speech and music. Moles’s text, when understood in tandem with the traces of his practical experiments in the sound studio, appears as an influential and occasionally prescient exposition of the many possible applications of the principles of information theory to the production, perception, and consumption of sound culture that makes ready use of the latest technical innovations in the media environment of its time.

Genome-wide association study of musical beat synchronization demonstrates high polygenicity

Nature Human Behaviour · 2019-11-09 · 12 citations

Abstract Moving in synchrony to the beat is a fundamental component of musicality. Here we conducted a genome-wide association study to identify common genetic variants associated with beat synchronization in 606,825 individuals. Beat synchronization exhibited a highly polygenic architecture, with 69 loci reaching genome-wide significance ( P &lt; 5 × 10 −8 ) and single-nucleotide-polymorphism-based heritability (on the liability scale) of 13%–16%. Heritability was enriched for genes expressed in brain tissues and for fetal and adult brain-specific gene regulatory elements, underscoring the role of central-nervous-system-expressed genes linked to the genetic basis of the trait. We performed validations of the self-report phenotype (through separate experiments) and of the genome-wide association study (polygenic scores for beat synchronization were associated with patients algorithmically classified as musicians in medical records of a separate biobank). Genetic correlations with breathing function, motor function, processing speed and chronotype suggest shared genetic architecture with beat synchronization and provide avenues for new phenotypic and genetic explorations.

7 UNRAVELING THE GENETIC ARCHITECTURE OF HUMAN MUSIC RHYTHM ABILITY: FINDINGS FROM THE FIRST GENOME-WIDE ASSOCIATION STUDY OF A MUSICAL RHYTHM TRAIT IN 606,825 INDIVIDUALS

European Neuropsychopharmacology · 2019-09-27 · 1 citations