Late breaking information

MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

05/10/2018

Musical Parsing in the Age of Spotify

Colloquium Musicology
Dr. Sebastian Klotz, Humboldt University

Thursday 11 October 2018, 15:30-17:00

Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01


This talk addresses the interface of empirical music psychology and commercial music technology
applications. Music streaming and recommender systems rely on advanced semantic searches and
similarity queues. The software defines some 1.000 musical events per track, generated from real
consumer behaviour during streaming & listening. While these parsing algorithms are shielded by the
companies, they beg the question which theories stand behind these clustered segmentations and
synthesized user profiles.

New parsing strategies coincide with potential changes of the formal design of tracks: in main-
stream maximal pop (Hannah Pilarczyk), in-song structural and dynamic changes are replaced by persistent hook-lines which affect the overall lay-out. Should this be the case, non-syntactic
algorithmic parsing would be the ideal tool to capitalize on this tendency.

The presentation argues that user-based approaches to musical events add a new dimension to the
primarily syntax-based concepts used by music psychology and computational feature extraction.
Following up on research undertaken by Robert Prey, the talk will examine the ideologies and the
technical operativity of listening and of corpus-based analysis. Does Spotify re-define listening? Are
streaming platforms part of an ubiquitous audio-governementality (Tom Holert, Terre Thaemlitz)?

Dr. Sebastian Klotz is professor of Transcultural Musicology and the Historical Anthropology of Music
at Humboldt University Berlin. He is particularly interested in the ways music and sounds inform
knowledge cultures. Last year, he initiated the Erich von Hornbostel Audio Emergence Lab (HAEL) at
the Department of Musicology and Media Studies.