Olmo Cornelis

   Visiting scholar in Ethnomusicology

   Postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University, Belgium

Project: Computational Approaches in Ethnomusicology: Pitch and Scales Research in Central African Music

The digitization of music archives opens up new opportunities in research. For the field of Ethnomusicology, this led to the new research branch Computational Ethnomusicology, a methodology that uses computational tools for the extraction of musical content by analyzing the auditory signal. My research concerns musical scale analysis on field recordings from the Sub-Saharan region that reside at the Archives of Traditional Music (ATM). Using computational tools for pitch extraction, I hope to gain a better understanding of the construction of musical scales, which might lead to a preliminary step in the creation of a classification of musical scales, and could give insights in their evolution over time.

This postdoctoral research is supported by a Fellowship of the Belgian American Educational Foundation (BAEF).