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Ethnographic Observations of Musicologists at the British Library: Implications for Music Information Retrieval

Without a rich understanding of user behaviours and needs, music information retrieval (MIR) systems might not be ideally suited to their potential users. In this study, we followed an ethnographic methodology to elicit some of the strategies used by musicologists to explore and document musical performances, in order to investigate if and how technologies could enhance such a process. Observations of musicologists studying historical recordings of classical music were conducted at the British Library. The observations show that the musicologists alternate between a closed listening practice, relying exclusively on aural observations, and a multimodal listening practice, where they interact with various music representations and information sources using different media (e.g. metadata about the recordings and performers, sound visualisations, scores, lyrics and performance videos). The spoken parts of broadcast recordings brought historical/extra-musical clues helping to understand music performance practices. Sound visualisation and computational methods fostered the analysis of specific musical expression patterns. We suggest that software designed for musicologists should facilitate switching between closed and multimodal listening modes, interaction with scores and lyrics, and analysis and annotation of speech and music performance using content-based MIR techniques.