| Résumé |
Knowledge build-up is a process which involves complex interactions between intellectual pursuits and the tools used to examine reality. While the interdependence between research and its instruments is more readily apparent in such fields as (say) neurophysics or microbiology, it is usually obscured in musicology, where the nature of the knowledge which is produced is rarely explicitly correlated to the devices which allow for its emergence. Computers provide new means to put in relation, organize, process, ascribe meaning to, and reuse a wide variety of musical information, that which lends itself to digitization (from traces of the compositional process such as sketches, notes, etc., to computer “patches”, musical scores, books and other forms of publications about the work; recordings of live events and on information about them, etc.), in massive in-depth and broad scopes, and thus cannot but have a major impact on contemporary musicology. Their use addresses a multiplicity of related domains (acoustical, perceptual, musical, technological, historical, social, legal…), and levels of interpretation (physical, symbolic, semantic, cognitive…). At the crossroad of the musical creative process, production and performance on the one hand, and research and development in the related sciences and technologies, IRCAM holds a particular place which allows for the examination of these interdependences in conjunction with the development of specific tools. In this paper, we will attempt at presenting some examples of the musicologist’s ideal instrumentation emerging from this reflection, as well as some of the concepts and tools which are already in use or in the course of realization. |
