Multimedia editing and analysis software

Zero-cost solutions recommended here: software included with your computer (providing basic functionality, sufficient for Music 666), or open source tools (which can be quite sophisticated).

Audio

audio editing: Audacity

speech transcription: TranscriberAG or Transcriva (see below also, under Text)

microtranscription in IPA: Charis unicode

Audio and MIDI:

Open source: Audacity, super open source and cross-platform (mac and win) audio editor. Get to know it. Another open source tool is Ardour.

Proprietary: GarageBand (included with mac) handles audio, MIDI, and can represent scores as well - it's quite useful. There are a number of similar options for Windows.

Pro: If you want to do a lot of mixing and editing, you may prefer a more professional product such as Cubase or Pro Tools.

Scorewriters:

Transcription certainly isn't as crucial as it used to be in ethnomusicology, but it's still an important intermediary zone between audio files and analysis, and transcribing remains a crucial step for getting close to the music (unless you're actually learning to perform it). The gap between sequencers and score writers has narrowed considerably, but for a flexible notational system you'll want the latter; see this wikipedia article. I use Sibelius, which has student student pricing, but there are even cheaper solutions out there. Finale does everything, but is typically overkill for ethnomusicology, and is cumbersome, in my opinion). A neat open source solution, suitably for monophony, is abc, widely used in the folk tune community. A few related links are An inexpensive but very powerful score writer is NoteAbility. A (gnu) free package is lilypond. You may couple scorewriters with use of MIDI keyboards or other devices (e.g. electronic drums) for faster input. See also Arduino below.

Symbolic representations, tune databases, and statistical analysis:

If you're interested in analyzing large musical corpi, traditional scores are not the way (and neither are audio files!). Some programming is probably required. You can analyze MIDI encodings directly, but that requires programming to read MIDI's binary format. Plus MIDI drops much important information (such as barlines) which is not required to drive a synthesizer. Considerably less programming is required to program analyses of textual representations, e.g. abc. Finally, consider the Humdrum toolkit, for an encompassing suite of standards and tools in wide use by music theorists.

Audio metadata:

Certain audio file formats have slots for metadata; these include BWF (broadcast wave format) and mp3. This is a pragmatic approach, since when encoded within the file (as opposed to a separate metadata database or table) the metadata will travel with the file automatically. MP3 format includes provisions for unfortunately limited information in the so-called ID3 tags, of which there are two versions (v1 and v2), the latter holding much more than the former. Various ID3 tag editors are available; I've been using fixtag, written in java. iMusic can also edit ID3 tags but the problem is that it stores some information in its own database, so it's hard to tell whether the information you're adding is actually getting stored in the file or not.

Analysis:

See: Ethnomusicology in the Laboratory: From the Tonometer to the Digital Melograph
David Cooper and Ian Sapiro
Ethnomusicology Forum
Vol. 15, No. 2 (Nov., 2006), pp. 301-313
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20184562
Contains an overview of Praat.

Sonic visualiser is a powerful analysis package for sound, and it's free.

For a linguistic approach, try Praat, developed for linguistics but suitable for short music segments also. Also free.

Simpler but often adequate is Audacity, which provides a number of analysis tools.

Another free tool is Speech Analyzer.

Not free but apparently quite good is Melodyne

Spear, Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Resynthesis.

Arduino, hardware for possible input (you may also connect a MIDI keyboard).

Also see Resources and Tools in Speech, Hearing and Phonetics from University College London.

Image

Software: the Gimp (free), Photoshop (expensive). "speaking photo” app.

Windows and Mac operating systems provide simple, free image editing software, e.g. iPhoto for mac. More sophisticated is the open source cross-platform project, GIMP. The professional package is Adobe Photoshop

Video

Software: avidemux, iMovie (for Mac) (free); Adobe, Final Cut Pro

Windows: Movie Maker, included with Windows up to Vista; Live Movie Maker for Windows 7. Many professional packages are available; probably Adobe's Premiere Pro (see below) is most widely used.

Mac: iMovie is simple video editing software included with every mac; suitable for presentations. Professional package for mac is Final cut pro

You can download a 30 day trial version of the industry cross-platform standard, Adobe Premiere Pro. A subscription may also be available to students through the IST store; check.

Linux: https://kdenlive.org/

Transcription software:

• https://www.inqscribe.com/ (untested!)

Video tracking software:

• http://physlets.org/tracker/

Text and qualitative research generally

We'll use the cross-platform HyperRESEARCH - not open source or even free, but a trial version is provided.

For transcription, see Transcriva and f4transkript or Transcribe. Another possibility is Dragon, though accuracy is limited, depending on language and clarity.