A Timeline Metaphor for Analyzing the Relationships between Musical Instruments and Musical Pieces

Abstract

Digitization projects make cultural heritage data sustainably available. However, while digital libraries may capture various aspects, relations across different sources often remain unobserved. In our project, musicologists aimed to relate musical instruments with historical performances of musical pieces, both contained in different sources. We defined a similarity measure taking instrumentation, temporal as well as geospatial metadata into account, with which we were able to hypothesize potential relations. We propose a novel timeline design that offers a specific semantic zoom metaphor enabling the collaborating musicologists to observe and evaluate the results of our similarity analysis. The value of our system for research in musicology is documented in three case studies.