One Score To Rule Them All: Semantics in Music Notation

‹#› Het begint met een idee
ONE SCORE TO
RULE THEM ALL:
SEMANTICS IN
MUSIC NOTATION
Albert Meroño-Peñuela, et al.
DHDK seminar, University of Bologna,
13/02/2018

R E F I N I N G S TAT I S T I C A L D ATA O N T H E W E B

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
4
ME
• Postdoc researcher at VU University Amsterdam,
Knowledge Representation & Reasoning
• Computer Science!
• Interfaces between the Digital Humanities and the
Semantic Web
• Representation of and access to cultural knowledge,
such as contained in historical objects, music sheets,
and statistical registers
• Ontologies, Linked Data, Semantic Music, APIs,
reproducibility, provenance
”Refining Statistical Data on the Web”

5
OUTLINE
• Digital Data-driven Humanities
• The human-machine spectrum of DH
• Beyond text processing
• Enabling a Global & Repeatable Social History
• Data preparation
• Data integration
• Reusing and publishing schemas
• Accessing the data OR Asking the same questions to different datasets
• One score to rule them all
• Music on the Web
• The MIDI Linked Data Cloud
• Creative applications
• This slide deck at http://tinyurl.com/semanticmusic

6
WHAT IS DIGITAL HUMANITIES?
“to study human culture in a more scientific way”
“to compute data from the humanities”
• Albert: “doing humanities is exactly equal to doing
science”
• Repeatability
• Hypothesis testing
• Pragmatic, clean, idealized
• Jacky: “doing humanities is completely different to
doing science”
• Interpretative approach, relativistic
• Give value to argumentation and vagueness instead of truth
• Focus on the questions we do ask
• https://storify.com/ingorohlfing/overly-honest-methods-in-science

7
THE HUMAN-MACHINE SPECTRUM OF DH
Purely
machine-based
Purely
human-based

8
BEYOND TEXT PROCESSING

9

10

ENABLING SOCIAL HISTORY
ON THE WEB

12
WHAT IS SOCIAL HISTORY?
Contrasted with political history, intellectual history and the history of great men
Explains history from the perspective of ordinary people (demography, work, family,
migration)
Uses (to a great degree) social science methods  Data science!

13
THE (HISTORICAL) KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY
PROCESS
VolumeVariety

14
DATA PREPARATION
Present data = high volume
Historical data = high variety
 Multiple legacy (tabular) formats
 Diverse identity, unity, rigidity and dependence
Preparing them to gain knowledge is expensive
 Manual data munging
 Hardly reproducible

15
DATA PREPARATION
This ‘data preparation’ step can take up to 60% 80% of the total work

We do this repeatedly for the same datasets!

17
CEDAR / CLARIAH
?
1795
1830
1889
1930
1971

18
TOWARDS 5-STAR HISTORICAL STATISTICAL DATA
>4 years ago
4 years ago

19
LINKED DATA – THE RDF GRAPH DATA MODEL
The Divine Comedy was written by Dante

20
Subject Predicate Object

21
dbr:Divine_Comedy dbp:author dbr:Dante_Alighieri .

22
dbr: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/...>
dbp: <http://dbpedia.org/property/...>

23
dbr: <http://dbpedia.org/resource/...>
dbp: <http://dbpedia.org/property/...>
dbr:Divine_Comedy rdf:type owl:Thing , dbo:Poem .
dbr:Divine_Comedy :completed “1320” .
…

24
GENERATING LINKED DATA FROM EXCEL
https://github.com/Data2Semantics/TabLinker
Credits to Rinke Hoekstra

25
GENERATING LINKED DATA FROM CSV
Semi-automatic
Generic
Domain independent
Microdata =
CSVW
[COW]
Macrodata = RDF
Data Cube [QBer]
[TabLinker]
Credits to Rinke Hoekstra

LSD DIMENSIONS – FINDING THE VERB
http://lsd-dimensions.org/
Index of statistical dimensions and associated concept schemes on
the Web

New code lists
• HISCO
http://historyofwork.iisg.nl/ Credits to Richard Zijdeman

New code lists
• Gemeentegeschiedenis.nl
http://www.gemeentegeschiedenis.nl/ Credits to Ivo Zandhuis

New code lists
http://licr.io/ Credits to Ashkan Ashkpour

Credits to Richard Zijdeman
http://nlgis.nl/

‹#› Het begint met een idee35

36 Het begint met een idee
 One .rq file for SPARQL query
 Good support of query curation
processes
> Versioning
> Branching
> Clone-pull-push
 Web-friendly features!
> One URI per query
> Uniquely identifiable
> De-referenceable
(raw.githubusercontent.com)
36 Faculty / department / title presentation
GITHUB AS A HUB OF
SPARQL QUERIES

37 Het begint met een idee
http://grlc.io/

38
THE GRLC SERVICE
 Assuming your repo is at https://github.com/:owner/:repo
and your grlc instance at :host,
> http://:host/:owner/:repo/spec returns the JSON swagger spec
> http://:host/:owner/:repo/api-docs returns the swagger UI
> http://:host/:owner/:repo/:operation?p_1=v_1...p_n=v_n calls
operation with specifiec parameter values
> Uses BASIL’s SPARQL variable name convention for query parameters
 Sends requests to
> https://api.github.com/repos/:owner/:repo to look for SPARQL queries and their
decorators
> https://raw.githubusercontent.com/:owner/:repo/master/file.rq to dereference
queries, get the SPARQL, and parse it

39
SPARQL DECORATOR SYNTAX

40
SPICED-UP SWAGGER UI

41
EVALUATION – USE CASES
 CEDAR: Access to census data for
historians
> Hides SPARQL
> Allows them to fill query parameters
through forms
> Co-existence of SPARQL and non-SPARQL
clients
 CLARIAH - Born Under a Bad Sign:
Do prenatal and early-life
conditions have an impact on
socioeconomic and health
outcomes later in life? (uses 1891
Canada and Sweden Linked Census Data)
> Reduction of coupling between SPARQL
libs and R
> Shorter R code – input stream as CSV

> “multiple copies of the same queries in different places (…)
was problematic. grlc allows queries to be maintained in a
single location”
> “with grlc the R code becomes clearer due to the decoupling
with SPARQL; and shorter, since a curl suffices to retrieve the
data”
> “it allows us to manage SPARQL queries separate from the rest
of the API – this enables, for instance, to have different queries
without having to deploy a new version of the API”
> “we use grlc to provide FAQ for those who would prefer REST
over SPARQL, but also to explore the data”
> “we use grlc to expose the ECAI conference proceedings not
only as Linked Data that can be used by Semantic Web
practitioners, but also as a Web API that web developers can
consume”
> “grlc helps to share, extend and repurpose queries by
providing a URI for the resulted queries and by supporting
collaborative update of those queries”
42
QUALITATIVE EVALUATION

43
QUANTITATIVE EVALUATION
The cost of grlc is independent of the dataset size
HTTP requests and payloads are important costs

ONE SCORE
TO RULE THEM ALL

 The “digital” as an instrument for the Humanities
45
SEMANTIC WEB AND THE HUMANITIES

46
ISWC 2013 JAM SESSION
Jam’s “metadata”

 The jam became global (i.e. de-referenceable URIs from
anywhere) rather than local
> But any video stream would have been more accurate (for humans)
 The jam became machine readable
> But not all of it
 Digital music as Linked Data?
 But why?
47
REPRESENTING MUSIC IN RDF?

48
THE WEB MUSIC ECOSYSTEM

49
LINKED MUSIC ON THE WEB
Linking Open Data cloud diagram 2017, by Andrejs Abele, John P. McCrae, Paul Buitelaar,
Anja Jentzsch and Richard Cyganiak. http://lod-cloud.net/
Etree
See Daquino et al. 2017 (WHiSe II)
Characterizing the Landscape of
Musical Data on the Web: state of
the art and challenges

Symbolic music databases (MusicXML, MIDI, NIFF, MEI) are non-interoperable
From Daquino et al.’s (WHiSe 2017):
 “Repositories and digital libraries are the most representative resources
collecting musical data. They mainly offer digitisations of scores and lyrics
(77%), published as PDF and/or JPG (40%)”
 “The more the scale of repositories increases, the less structured formats for
representing symbolic notation seem to be used and the less depth of
analysis is provided”
 “Larger collections are more likely to feature melody”
Can we find ways of increasing the level of structure of musical data
without compromising its scalability?
50
COOL, BUT…

 MIDI: Digital music representation protocol
> (i.e. leaving nothing to analog signals  actual instruments)
 Popular/abundant, production, standard
 Musical Instrument Digital Interface (1983)
> Universal synthesizer interface
> Roland (I. Kakehashi), Yamaha, Korg, Kawai (1981)
> Digital, fine-grained representation of musical tracks and events
> Wide range of controllers and instruments
51
MIDI

[ 144, 60, 100 ]
52
BUT WHAT IS MIDI?
Thanks @rumyra! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khsBjXKJOPs

[ 144, 60, 100 ]
[ 128, 60, 64 ]
53
BUT WHAT IS MIDI?
Thanks @rumyra! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khsBjXKJOPs

midi2rdf: lossless conversion of MIDI to RDF (and back)
Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Rinke Hoekstra. “The Song Remains the Same: Lossless Conversion and
Streaming of MIDI to RDF and Back”. In: 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2016),
posters and demos track. May 29th — June 2nd, Heraklion, Crete, Greece (2016).
 rdf2midi, direct stream mapping
54
MIDI2RDF & RDF2MIDI
https://midi-ld.github.io/

 Music representation format which is
> 100% digital (i.e. leaving nothing to analog signals)
> Secundary list
 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface)
> Universal synthesizer interface
> Roland (I. Kakehashi), Yamaha, Korg, Kawai (1981)
> Digital, fine-grained representation of musical events
> Wide range of controllers and instruments
55
WEEKEND EXPERIMENT

56
MIDI LINKED DATA
http://purl.org/midi-ld/pattern/635f0b49bb3f62c3a76cc58f979bd858

57
MIDI SCHEMA
http://purl.org/midi-ld/midi#

58
MIDI LINKED DATA RESOURCES
 MIDI Pieces http://purl.org/midi-ld/piece/
> Access to MIDI level triples
> Cryptographic hash for unique MIDI content
http://purl.org/midi-ld/pattern/87dd99fb346cd4c7934cb36a00868cbe
 MIDI Notes http://purl.org/midi-ld/notes/
> Type, label, octave, pitch value
 MIDI Programs http://purl.org/midi-ld/programs/
> All instruments linked to DBpedia
 MIDI Chords http://purl.org/midi-ld/chords/
> Label, quality, number of pitch classes, intervals
 Enrichments
> Provenance
> Integrated lyrics (mostly from karaoke data)
> Key (Krumhansl-Schumkler), scale degree, metric accents

59
MIDI LINKED DATA RESOURCES
Current collections
 The largest MIDI collection on the Internet (thanks @midi_man)
 Lakh MIDI dataset (thanks @colinraffel)
 MySongBook MIDI
 Yours! https://midi-ld.github.com
 308,443 interconnected MIDI files
 10,215,557,355 triples
 Full dump, SPARQL endpoint, RESTful API

60
ENABLING SEMANTIC WEB RESEARCH
 Data integration
> Further format interoperability: MIDI, MusicXML, NIFF, MEI
> Integration with formats of other arts: LabanXML
 Entity linking
> Audio (Spotify URIs), symbolic notation (MIDI), metadata (MusicBrainz)
> High heterogeneity, low overlap
> Challenge to entity linking algorithms
 Semantics and ontologies
> Music Ontology, Chord Ontology, Timeline Ontology
> Underspecification of musical concepts
> Reasoning
> Challenge for ontology alignment

61
ENABLING MUSICOLOGY RESEARCH
 Analysis of chords, patterns and melodies at Web scale
> Integrating knowledge from external databases
> Historical, geographical, cultural, economic, sylistic contexts
 Everything has a URI
> Annotation tasks, workflow descriptions
 Establishing standard Web vocabularies
> Chords (iReal Pro), melodies, metadata
 Recommender systems
> Collaborative filtering, content-based feature extraction, hybrid
> Notation-based support for abstract representation of musical concepts
 Machine learning (multimodal training data, convincing samples)
 Audiolisation

63
SPARQL-DJ
Web-based tool that finds, selects, plays, mixes, beat-
syncs and generates MIDI mashups from a very large MIDI
Linked Data collection

64
SONIC PI

65
RDF PI
https://github.com/midi-ld/Web-MIDI-API
Live coding music directly in RDF (MIDI)
Everything happens in your browser (RDF
parsing, Web MIDI API)

66
THE MUSIC SEMANTIC GAP
• MIR tasks have a
performance ceiling
of 65% accuracy,
independently of
the method
• Cause: semantic
gap
• The closer to the
gap, the harder the
task
Some ontologies in
place, BUT:
• Metadata
• Audio features
• Ignore notation

67
THE MUSIC SEMANTIC GAP
What knowledge representations
and algorithms are needed to
generalize music symbolic notation
and include it into the existing
music retrieval formalisms, in order
to reduce the semantic gap?
• A knowledge graph of symbolic
notation
• Data and methods
Challenges:
1. KR for notation (horizontal gap)
← machine learning, ontology
engineering
2. Bridging notation and humans
(vertical gap) ← ontology
matching
3. Multimodal entity linking
(inter-dataset gap) ← hybrid
FT, DTW + LIMES

Music and Knowledge
Representation
"Music impregnates every person’s memory,
reasoning, and language. And yet, we lack a global
view of all of humankind’s musical knowledge,
telling us precisely what music we know, how
much there is, and how it differs across societies."

69
CONCLUSIONS (I)
 Semantic Web and Digital Humanities: to science, or not to
science?
 Data preparation = 80% of work
> We throw it away after use!
 Linked Data based solutions
> Use RDF to make research repeatable – but more intuitive tools needed
> Statistical dimensions & codelists – but hard to find, might be missing
> GitHub for queries as Linked Data APIs – enables reproducibility, you need
an expert JUST ONCE

70
CONCLUSIONS (AND II)
 One score to rule them all
> General knowledge representation language (RDF) for music (MIDI)
> Mappings for MusicXML, MEI, NIFF, and others
> The spectrum of symbolic music vs low level audio signal
 Quality (& automatic) links to external Linked Datasets
> MusicBrainz, DBpedia, etc.
> Hybrid approaches (metadata, lyrics, incipits, MIR algorithms)
 Tools
> (Contextual) querying
> Annotation (every note has a URL!)
> Workflow recording
 Your ideas & contributions most welcome! https://midi-ld.github.io/

> Albert Meroño-Peñuela. “Humanists And Scientists: More Alike Than Different”. eHumanities Magazine,
number 7, February 2016 (HTML)
> Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Rinke Hoekstra. “grlc Makes GitHub Taste Like Linked Data APIs”. SALAD 2016 —
Services and Applications over Linked Data APIs and Data. International workshop, ESWC 2016, May 29th,
Heraklion, Crete, Greece (2016). (PDF)
> Rinke Hoekstra, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Kathrin Dentler, Auke Rijpma, Richard Zijdeman, Ivo Zandhuis. “An
Ecosystem for Linked Humanities Data”. In: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Humanities in the SEmantic
web (WHiSE 2016). ESWC 2016, May 29th, Heraklion, Crete, Greece (2016). (PDF)
> Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Rinke Hoekstra. “The Song Remains the Same: Lossless Conversion and Streaming of
MIDI to RDF and Back”. In: 13th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2016), posters and demos track.
May 29th — June 2nd, Heraklion, Crete, Greece (2016). (PDF)
> Albert Meroño-Peñuela. “Refining Statistical Data on the Web”. Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2016) (Amazon)
(VU-DARE)
> Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Christophe Guéret, Stefan Schlobach. “Linked Edit Rules: A Web Friendly Way of
Checking Quality of RDF Data Cubes”. Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Semantic Statistics
(SemStats 2015), ISWC 2015, Bethlehem, PA, USA (2015). (PDF)
> Bas Stringer, Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Antonis Loizou, Sanne Abeln, Jaap Heringa. “To SCRY Linked Data:
Extending SPARQL the Easy Way”. Diversity++ workshop, ISWC 2015, Bethlehem, PA, USA (2015). (PDF)
> Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Ashkan Ashkpour, Marieke van Erp, Kees Mandemakers, Leen Breure, Andrea
Scharnhorst, Stefan Schlobach, Frank van Harmelen. “Semantic Technologies for Historical Research: A
Survey”. Semantic Web — Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, 6(6), pp. 539–564. IOS Press (2015).
> Albert Meroño-Peñuela, Ashkan Ashkpour, Christophe Guéret, Stefan Schlobach. “CEDAR: The Dutch
Historical Censuses as Linked Open Data”. Semantic Web — Interoperability, Usability, Applicability, 8(2), pp.
297–310. IOS Press (2015).71
PUBLICATIONS

THANK YOU!
@albertmeronyo
DATALEGEND.NET
CLARIAH.NL
72

73
A BASIC WEB SYSTEMS COMMUNICATION TOOLKIT
1. Endpoint location is volatile
Names encapsulate semantics of operations → Should be
meaningless, just as email addresses
HTTP : http://example.org/canihasdata
2. Consensus on data semantics is necessary
Simple object exchange format + 15 years of Web ontology
development to semantically describe data
JSON+LD : [{ "@id": "eg:Albert",
"rdf:type": [{ "@id": "foaf:Person" }]}]

74
LINKED DATA NOTIFICATIONS
https://www.w3.org/TR/ldn/
Thanks to Sarven Capadisli

75
IMPLEMENTATIONS
http://pyldn.amp.ops.labs.vu.nl/
https://github.com/albertmeronyo/pyldn/

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