Our project aims to better understand processes of cultural exchange using popular music from Malaysia and Indonesia as an example. Why do we focus on music from this region? Indonesia and Malaysia belong to a geographical area often referred to collectively as the Malay world due to their cultural similarities. At the same time, this area is characterized by a high degree of cultural diversity, which is particularly reflected in the regional music. This music has developed through centuries of mixing regional traditions and supra-regional influences.
Our goal is to use computational methods to understand the complex composition of diverse influences that make up Malay music. We draw on previous research that has identified Indian, Arabic, Chinese, and Western music as key influences on Malay music. Based on this, we want to examine the extent to which these diverse cultural influences can be understood using modern methods of musical signal processing. We focus on popular music of the 20th century, as this is particularly representative of the interweaving of diverse cultural influences in the region. In summary, we aim to examine the extent to which Malay music shares similarities with these assumed influences with regard to various musical parameters.
The implementation of our project comprises several steps. The starting point is the collection, archiving, and digitization of musical recordings, primarily in the form of vinyl records, compact cassettes, and CDs. We analyze the resulting audio files using the Computational Music and Sound Archiving (CoMSAr), a digital signal processing system developed at the Institute for Systematic Musicology at the University of Hamburg. CoMSAr uses various algorithms to sort audio files according to similarity based on various musical parameters such as loudness, timbre, or musical mood. The analysis results are visualized in the form of self-organizing maps (also called Kohonen maps), which represent high-dimensional data in a topographical map. This form of data visualization allows us to identify commonalities between different types of music that the human ear alone cannot necessarily identify.
In doing so, we bring together various disciplines and research fields that have previously been determined to varying degrees by computational methods. We aim to expand the research field of Southeast Asian studies through new computational approaches to systematic musicology. In our opinion, humanities-related questions offer particularly promising interdisciplinary applications for computational methods. These approaches can provide new insights, particularly for research into cultural transformation processes using music.