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PHILHARMONICA. International Music Journal
Reference:

Technologies of deep text analysis in musicology

Michkov Pavel Aleksandrovich

ORCID: 0000-0001-8227-7190

PhD in Art History

Associate Professor, Department of Music Theory, Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education "Novosibirsk State Conservatory named after M.I. Glinka"

630099, Russia, Novosibirskaya oblast', g. Novosibirsk, ul. Sovetskaya, 31, of. 224

p.michkov@nsglinka.ru

DOI:

10.7256/2453-613X.2022.3.37797

Received:

05-04-2022


Published:

05-06-2022


Abstract: The article considers the possibility of improving the mechanism of work of the author-musicologist with the texts of historical musicology. The purpose of the article is to consider the mechanisms of detecting internal relationships between the elements of a musicological text. The subject of the study is verbal texts of musicology. The object of this article is analytical tools of modern digital technologies for working with texts. The author examines in detail such aspects as the selection and formation of a set of keywords, the definition of the structure of the search for information necessary for research. Particular attention is paid to the internal processes of the musicology laboratory, within which it is not always possible to form a set of key verbal meanings of a prepared study using traditional methods. The author for the first time proposed a methodology for using computer tools for deep text analysis programs in the daily activities of a musicologist-researcher. The scope of the methodology is not limited to the field of music science, it can find solutions in other fields of knowledge. In the course of the research, the practical side of the product implementation is highlighted, the stages of post-processing of a text array are presented in a concise form. At the same time, the problematic "slice" stated in the study turns out to be saturated with other information content, which allows us to further find hidden patterns of development of certain processes, discover new relationships and determine new vectors of scientific research.


Keywords:

in-depth text analysis, computer assistance, informative description, musicology technologies, analysis of publications, music science, verbal analysis, computer simulation, horizons of research, information and communication technologies

This article is automatically translated.

At the moment, information support and description of scientific papers are actively changing. Information search is expanding and improving. Increasingly, the standards for describing the corpus of scientific literature suggest the use of its automatic processing. These conditions are also applied to works in the field of musicology. So, in many scientific journals about the musical art and on the websites of publishing houses, the rules for the design of the work for publication are set out: the rules include a number of parameters: the author's surname, the title of the work, an abstract (usually in two languages) and a set of keywords. Note that the set of keywords is compiled by the author of the study. It is the author who can most accurately determine those lexical units in which the meaning of the text is concentrated. On the other hand, this approach somewhat veils the phenomenon of the ambiguity of the text, the invariance of its semantic field. The author consciously encloses the text in a certain framework, set by the parameters of the key values in the form of a set of words and phrases. Based on this, the subject of this article is the process of forming a set of key phrases by means of computer assisted technologies.

Thus, when describing a document in automated library systems, key values are also introduced. If there is no author's set of such meanings, then those words and phrases that are used as the title of the source or the titles of the sections of the work are crucial. This means that during the search process, documents in which the keywords specified by the user are nearby will be prioritized, that is, they will be ranked above all other documents. Thus, it turns out that this method, which is currently the simplest and most convenient, ultimately does not guarantee the adequacy of the transmission of the content of the text with keywords.

More promising is the process of user involvement in the search operation – in the stages of setting up the information search scheme. In this case, the process of searching for the necessary set of keywords turns out to be personalized. So, the dialog structure "researcher – a computer program for text analysis" can be used:

a) in the process of preparing the study for publication;

b) in the work of the bibliographer when cataloguing any publication;

c) in the process of analyzing the structure of a scientific problem or the hidden properties of text arrays.

A number of authors investigate the methodology of engagement processes. So, with regard to the first two points ("a", "b"), T. Volkova suggests applying a similar procedure, arguing that "for digitized paper documents, it will be necessary to conduct a semantic analysis of texts and on the basis of such analysis to obtain a compressed text that is keywords and phrases" [1, p. 285]. However, her research does not talk about how such an analysis of the text will be carried out. In both cases, the use of deep text analysis programs may be one of the solutions to the problem. Let's consider the capabilities of the TextAnalyst program using the example of a comparative analysis of a set of keywords proposed by the authors themselves with the results of the analysis of the same texts performed by the TextAnalyst program.

In the 70s of the XX century, in the works of A. Mol [2], I. D. Rud, I. I. Zuckerman [3], the possibility of using an information approach in musicology began to be considered in connection with the development of information systems. Musicology has extrapolated the basic laws of information theory into music science, finding similarities with them in the doctrine of musical formation and the sociology of musical culture. It is obvious that the development of the information approach in musicology is directly related to text structures. Performing various operations with the text formed new methods of research of scientific information, organically including them in musicology. This is confirmed by the appearance of works on the study of musicological research creativity. A striking example is the work of T. I. Naumenko [4] on the analysis of the style of verbal texts of musicology.

Articles from the journals "Musicology" and "Music and Time" were chosen as the material for the experiment. This choice was due to the subject matter of the publications, which covers a wide range of musicological problems (questions of theory, history of music, musical ethnography, paleography, pedagogical issues and problems of musical performance are covered), as well as the fact that since 2009, authors must accompany the text of the article with a set of keywords. It should be noted that in these periodicals, the authors of the publications, together with the text of the work, also attach a brief annotation.

It is assumed that the set of keywords given by the authors of the works may differ or coincide with the results of computer analysis of the text. Stylistic or thematic kinship of studies located in the same group is also possible. In addition, we take into account that in the process of subsequent search for a scientific article by the reader, "viewing annotations and keywords facilitates the task of getting acquainted with new products, but, of course, does not solve the problem of collecting and in-depth study of literature on a particular topic" [5, p. 99].

As the first example illustrating the results of an experiment conducted to determine a group of keywords by means of a deep text analysis program, we present articles from the magazine "Music and Time". The examples were taken in pairs due to their thematic and some stylistic heterogeneity. Both articles are devoted to the study of problems in the field of music science: the work of I. Yu. Proskurina's "The Last Work of A.K. Glazunov: a Musicological Investigation" [6] is in the field of historical musicology and is devoted to the study of a musical work of the late period of A. K. Glazunov's creativity. The scope of the problems identified in T. P. Petrova's publication "The Ceremonials" by D. Ligeti: Between Meaning and Absurdity" [7] is at the intersection of the fields of historical and theoretical musicology.

In the diagrams that represent the results of the analysis of articles (Example 1), it is noted that the set of keywords proposed by the authors of the analyzed articles intersects with the results of the text analysis performed using the TextAnalyst program. Meanwhile, in most cases, the range of key values generated by the program is much wider than the set presented by the researchers:

Example 1

Comparative scheme of keyword set analysis

articles by G. P. Petrova "Ceremonials" by D. Ligeti: between Meaning and Absurdity"

 

With regard to point "c", let's consider another type of text analysis – sets of words and phrases formed on the basis of the specific weight of text elements. Perhaps, in this case, new perspectives of text analytics arise.

In the periodical "Musicology", groups of materials are formed according to the structural composition of the publication – according to the headings of the journal. Such an organization makes it possible to combine thematically related studies into joint sections. The current system of headings has been established in the periodical under study. A separate section includes the heading "Works of young scientists", which offers research by graduate students, often in different thematic areas, but, meanwhile, combined into one group. In addition to these headings, the journal presents the "Conferences" section, which highlights the events of past scientific meetings and discussions.

The thematic content of the issues of the magazine for the calendar year covers the work of a wide range of composers of different stylistic eras and trends. Journalistic materials cover facts related to the musical activities and biographies of L. Beethoven, M. P. Mussorgsky, B. Bartok, G. V. Sviridov, F. Karaev, V. A. Gavrilin, H. Distler and others. Works on ethnomusicology explore the traditions of creativity of Tajiks, Tuvans, Indians, Buryats, Vietnamese and Slavic peoples. The research topics of young scientists are diverse – from the stylistic features of I. F. 's creativity . Stravinsky, E. I. Podhajtsa, A. Dvorak, A. Piatsolla to the characteristics of genres of children's musical folklore and the problems of Russian musical constructivism.

After the necessary preparation and processing of the text, its analysis is performed using a computer program [1]. In the process of analysis, the text is divided into segments, between which relationships are established. Based on the weight of the relationships in the text, the program determines a set of the most significant words and phrases. Such a set can be conditionally considered a set of keywords and expressions of the source text. In addition, a scheme of the frequency distribution of words in the text is proposed, based on the number of their repetitions. Thus, formally, the purpose of such an analysis is to build a tree of dependencies between words and phrases in the text. Proposals are presented in the form of branches with a single root vertex. Since one word form can correspond to several grammatical forms of a word, it is necessary to verify the results of segmentation during the analysis.

The method in which the author's ideas about the original scientific problem are built up in the form of a structure leads to the identification of the context of the work and the alignment of potential areas-sources of information. According to the correct remark of N.S. Bazhanov: "in order to improve the search for information, it is necessary to more fully and holistically present the structure of information search" [8, p. 3]. In terms of studying the material by means of deep text analysis programs, there is a tendency to identify potential contextual areas at the level of primary analysis. There is a possibility of finding hidden properties of text arrays.

In T. B. Budaeva's article "The Vocal side of the Beijing Opera" [9], the abstract was excluded from the general body of the analyzed text. The results of the analysis showed that the words "makeup" and "paint" are often interacting expressions at a fairly close distance (Example 2):

 Example 2.

View of the abstract of T. Budaeva's article "The vocal side of the Beijing Opera"

 

There are none in the group of keywords in the author's annotation, but after reading the article it turns out that the spectacular and coloristic performances of the Beijing Opera are represented by bright makeup and colors, while less attention is paid to the musical side in the research literature. The conclusion suggests itself that in the case of searching for sources whose content touches on the topic of theatricality of Chinese theater productions, the publication in question will be excluded from the search results, since the meaningfully important meanings ("makeup", "paint") are absent from the keywords.

It is important to note that in this case, when using a deep text analysis program in their activities, the author of the publication has the opportunity to either supplement the existing list of keywords, or reformulate it. In any case, the researcher is invited to take another look at his text from a slightly different angle, given the opportunity to identify new sides and identify new meanings that he probably had not noticed before.

As a rule, software products of this kind determine the quantitative characteristics of the most frequently used words and phrases. In the presented analysis of musicological articles, in addition to the frequency distribution of phrases, a scheme is presented, constructed in the order of the semantic meaning of phrases in the text. This structure is determined by the number of repetitions throughout the material. The role of repetition in the humanities has recently become the subject of close attention of researchers. The principles of repetition are studied in detail in the works of literary critics – Y. Lotman [10] and S. A. Reiser [11].

Turning to the analysis of repetitive elements in the structure of musicological texts allows us to make several assumptions about the reasons for their appearance and role in the process of reader perception. If two concepts are in the same sentence, then there is an interaction between them, which is explicitly or covertly narrated by this text. The increased frequency of the use of a pair or group of terms in a paragraph also indicates their relationship, which needs to be disclosed, explained, discussed.

Thus, one of the important factors influencing the quantitative composition of repeated phrases may be the stylistic attitude of the author to the specific text he creates. It is known that the style of a scientific work can differ significantly from a journalistic, official-business or artistic one. The stylistic technique of repetition is one of the main means of accentuation in the text, its compositional organization. Consequently, elements characteristic of one style may not be involved in another. Nevertheless, there are examples of a subtle fusion of different stylistic intentions within a single text.

Another factor affecting the repetition of words and phrases is the psychological aspect. The author can quite deliberately use the repetition of certain words and expressions to emphasize the focus of the reader's attention to specific aspects and elements of the covered topic. In the text, such techniques perform a double function: on the one hand, they act as a method of compositional design of the material, a means of developing the main thematic elements, on the other hand, they contribute to achieving communicative goals, focusing attention, forming a certain evaluative attitude to the text.

In addition to the obvious techniques – stylistics and intentional concentration of text structures, the "body" of the text may contain key elements that make up a separate thematic area. And finally, the most important thing. The repetition of the use of words and phrases is due to semantic, semantic relationships that objectively exist between them in the text. The identification of such interactions with the help of assisting computer programs for text analysis opens up new horizons, new opportunities in the activities of a musicologist.

Thus, it can be noted that the information approach offers the musicologist another option for the study of the phenomenon of musical art he is studying. Such a problematic "slice" turns out to be saturated with other information content, which makes it possible to find hidden patterns of development of certain processes in the future. Of course, like any other, this method has its own limits of use and is not a universal technology at all. It is impossible to outline the zone of its action with an exact line marking the boundaries of truths, but it is quite possible to add a new research instrument to the musicology laboratory.

[1]           When analyzing the text by a computer program, the annotations in English accompanying the articles were excluded from the source material, since they are duplicated in the original language. The musical fragments offered by the authors in the form of illustrations are also not subject to analysis, since the examples are a graphic image.

References
1. Volkova, T. A. (2009). To the question of the methodology for creating a multimedia portal of culture (on the example of the portal "Memory of Yakutia"). Art education in the cultural space of the Arctic = Art education in Cultural Space of the Arctic: materials of the international. scientific-practical. conf., 26-27 Nov. 2009, Yakutsk, 284-286.
2. Mol, A. (1956). Information Theory and Aesthetic Perception. Moscow.
3. Rud, I. D., Tsukerman, I. I. (1974). On the possibility of an information-theoretical approach to some problems of musical thinking and perception. Problems of musical thinking, 207-239.
4. Naumenko, T. I. (2005). Musicology: the style of a scientific work: (an experience of posing a problem). Moscow: RAM im. Gnesinykh.
5. Frantova, T. V. (2021). Laocoon and Aphrodite “in one bottle”, or Life and death of academic musicology in the electronic era. South Russian Musical Almanac, 2, 97–102. doi: 10.52469/20764766_2021_02_97
6. Proskurina, I. Yu. (2010). The last work of A.K. Glazunov: musicological investigation. Music and time, 8, 21-26.
7. Petrova, T. P. (2010). “Ceremonials” by D. Ligeti: between meaning and absurdity. Music and Time, 8, 9–14.
8. Bazhanov, N. S. (2016). On the system of information retrieval in the texts of historical musicology. Vestn. Volume. state university Cultural studies and art history, 1 (21). Retrieved from: https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/o-sisteme-poiska-informatsii-v-tekstah-istoricheskogo-muzykoznaniya
9. Budaeva, T. B. (2009). The vocal side of the Peking Opera. Musicology, 1, 47–53.
10. Lotman, Yu. M. (1970). The structure of the literary text. Moscow: Art.
11. Reiser, S. A. (1978). Fundamentals of textology. Leningrad: Education

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To the journal "PHILHARMONICA. International Music Journal" the author presented his article "Technologies of in-depth text analysis in musicology", which conducted a study of technologies and mechanisms for searching scientific musicological works. The author proceeds in the study of this issue from the fact that in the era of advanced information technologies, all spheres of human activity are subject to automation. Information search is expanding and improving. Increasingly, the standards for describing the corpus of scientific literature suggest the use of its automatic processing. These conditions are also applied to works in the field of musicology. Today, each publishing house defines a certain range of requirements for potential authors, which should facilitate the subsequent automated search for an interested circle of people, namely: title, abstract, keywords. The relevance of this issue is determined by the widespread widespread use of an automatic information retrieval system and modern standards for the design of scientific papers required in various areas of scientific research. The scientific novelty lies in the study of the possibility of using the TextAnalyst program for in-depth text analysis. The methodological basis of the study was an integrated approach containing a functional and comparative method, as well as an experiment. The theoretical justification was provided by the works of such researchers of socio-cultural information and texts as A. Mol, Y.M. Lotman, T.I. Naumenko, T.A. Volkova, etc. The empirical material was scientific articles published in the journals "Musicology" and "Music and Time". The purpose of this study is to analyze the process of forming a set of key phrases by means of computer assisted technologies. Having conducted a bibliographic analysis and investigated the scientific validity of the studied issues, the author argues that already in the 70s of the XX century, the possibility of using an information approach in musicology began to be considered in connection with the development of information systems. Musicology has extrapolated the basic laws of information theory into musical science, finding similarities with them in the doctrine of musical formation and the sociology of musical culture. The development of the information approach in musicology is directly related to the study of textual structures. Performing various operations with the text has formed new methods of research of scientific information, organically incorporating them into musicology. As the author notes, the simplest and most common search for necessary information in both virtual and printed catalogs is keyword search. The set of keywords is compiled by the author of the study himself, since it is the author who can most accurately identify those lexical units in which the meaning of the text is concentrated. However, according to the author of the article, this approach somewhat veils the phenomenon of the ambiguity of the text, the invariance of its semantic field. The author of a scientific work consciously encloses the text in a certain framework, set by the parameters of key meanings in the form of a set of words and phrases. Thus, according to the author, this method ultimately does not guarantee the adequacy of the transmission of the text content with keywords. The author considers the process of user involvement in the search operation, in the stages of configuring the information search scheme, to be more promising. In this case, the process of searching for the required set of keywords turns out to be personalized. The author suggests three main areas in which the ability to customize the user's search is the most effective: preparing a study for publication, the work of a bibliographer when cataloging a publication, analyzing the structure of a scientific problem or the hidden properties of text arrays. In the first two directions, the author believes that the use of deep text analysis programs can be one of the solutions to the problem. The author examines the possibilities of the TextAnalyst program using the example of a comparative analysis of a set of keywords proposed by the authors themselves with the results of the analysis of the same texts performed by the TextAnalyst program. The author selected articles from the journals "Musicology" and "Music and Time" as the material for the experiment. This choice was due to the subject matter of the publications, which covers a wide range of musicological problems (questions of theory, history of music, musical ethnography, paleography, pedagogical issues and problems of musical performance are highlighted), as well as the fact that since 2009, authors must accompany the text of the article with a set of keywords. According to the results of the experiment, the author notes that the set of keywords proposed by the authors of the analyzed articles intersects with the results of text analysis performed using the TextAnalyst program. Meanwhile, in most cases, the range of key values generated by the program is much wider than the set presented by the researchers. In the third direction, the author suggests the analysis of sets of words and phrases formed on the basis of the specific gravity of text elements as the most effective. After the necessary preparation and processing of the text, its analysis is performed using a computer program. In the process of analysis, the text is divided into segments, between which relationships are established. Based on the weight of the relationships in the text, the program determines a set of the most significant words and phrases. Illustrating the work of the program using the example of T. B. Budaeva's article "The vocal side of the Beijing Opera", the author notes that often the results of the program and the author's initial opinion may differ due to both objective (frequency of repetition) and subjective (the author's style of the text, deliberate emphasis) reasons. This discrepancy allows the author to revise or supplement his abstract and the list of keywords. Having conducted the research, the author presents conclusions on the studied materials, noting that in-depth analysis of a musicological text using computer programs is not a universal technology and cannot be used in isolation. In the aggregate of research methods, this method can serve as an effective tool. It seems that the author in his material touched upon relevant and interesting issues for modern socio-humanitarian knowledge, choosing a topic for analysis, consideration of which in scientific research discourse will entail certain changes in the established approaches and directions of analysis of the problem addressed in the presented article. The results obtained allow us to assert that the study of the possibility of using modern technologies in musicological research is of undoubted theoretical and practical cultural interest and can serve as a source of further research. The material presented in the work has a clear, logically structured structure that contributes to a more complete assimilation of the material. An adequate choice of methodological base also contributes to this. The bibliographic list of the study consists of 11 sources, which seems sufficient for the generalization and analysis of scientific discourse on the subject under study. The author fulfilled his goal, received certain scientific results that allowed him to summarize the material. It should be noted that the article may be of interest to readers and deserves to be published in a reputable scientific publication.