Eamonn Bell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Durham University. His research interests fall under the broad umbrella of the digital humanities and he now teaches across the computer science curriculum at Durham. Since 2019, his research has been funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Irish Research Council, and a number of smaller institutional grants. He is most recently involved in the design and delivery of several DRI projects serving UK-based arts, humanities, and culture researchers.
Before coming to Durham, he was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Music, Trinity College Dublin where he conducted research on how the once-ubiquitous audio Compact Disc (CD) format was designed, subverted, reproduced and domesticated for musical ends. He holds a PhD in Music Theory from Columbia University (2019), where he wrote a dissertation on the early use of digital computers in the analysis of musical scores under the supervision of Joseph Dubiel. Shortly before he began graduate studies in music at Columbia, he graduated from TCD with a joint honours degree (a “two-subject moderatorship”) in Music and Mathematics (2013).
This is my place on the web. Eventually, you’ll find below all manner of publications, blog posts, microblog posts, and essays. Some of this content was previously hosted on my academic website at Columbia and on a Jekyll blog that was hosted on GitHub Pages. You can also find me on Mastodon.
Here’s a script that brute-forces its way through the 24 operations on PLR space for sucessive pairs of chords in the reduction of a Bach chorale.
I use a canonical name for the operation. Of course, most of these operations have homologues. The shortest label may not accurately reflect the relations between the harmonies (or so one school of thought has it). Choosing from equivalent composed operations lends an element of expressivity to NRT.
I spent some time this morning transcribing the motives that make up Terry Riley’s In C into TinyNotation so that I could use them in the creation of a script which creates scores instances of hypothetical performances of the work. I have this crazy idea that repeatedly doing this on a large enough scale could generate data enough to facilitate a formalist statistical analysis of this seminal aleatoric work.
Most of the computation time seems to go into into showing the MusicXML score. For scores with parts numbering less than four, this is passable. Better to render to Lilypond, if you can. However, this creates an unwieldy image or EPS file that is next to useless for print purposes. Anyway, the point here isn’t so much the printed score as end product, it’s the creation of a symbolic representation of the score which can be then further reduced and analysed with the help of music21 and/or common sense.
I use the vim extension vimwiki to manage a local wiki which I keep scrappy notes in, especially one-line ideas that I am liable to forget. Since I’d like to have access to this anywhere and at any time, I set up vimwiki to use ~/Google Drive/.vimwiki as its main wiki directory, which is kept in sync with my Google Drive. I then use Drive Notepad for quick edits of the wiki files (which are just plain text). The only hack required to use this was to force vimwiki to store its wiki files with the .wiki.md extension, otherwise Drive Notepad doesn’t want to edit them.
One of my personal goals for this year was to learn enough LaTeX to be able to typeset my undergraduate dissertation, such that it conforms with the fairly strict and idiosyncratic style guide that our department enforces for submitted work. Suffice to say that I’ve learned more about LaTeX and its plethora of packages in the two weeks before submission than I have done in the last few years that I have known of its existence.
I have, regrettably, two Spotify accounts. One was created from within Facebook and automatically included all my Facebook friends who use Spotify. Because I don’t want to lose my Spotify life if I leave Facebook, I created a second Facebook-independent Spotify account using a different email address (this is possible).
However, it would be nice still to follow my Facebook friends’ music selections and activity. Until I close my first account, however, all links to Spotify resources on Facebook will initiate a new session in the Spotify app using my first set of credentials (the Facebook one), and unless I link my second account to Facebook this will remain the case. That of course, defeats the purpose.
Today was spent in a typically traditional manner, home with the family and a full turkey and ham. All very delicious.
The christmas festivities on the day were preceded by an extended service at the local church which entailed a great deal of homophonic hymns.
There was an interesting setting of ‘Ding Dong’ with an insanely chromatic bass-line for the refrain but apart from that, fairly unadventurous.
From today, I’ll try and update this blog daily with some daycently vague observations about life, with a musical perspective.
You know the one; as if a hundred thousand tiny pins are undulating under your skin, from the tips to the base of your spine?
The power of a work of art to move us into what are essentially extra-terrestrial planes defies explanation by even the most staunchly rational scientific mind.
Well, that’s only partly true.
Everyone knows (why, of course, don’t you?) that sensations of happiness are merely by-products of a chemical process. An essentially deterministic outcome of the experiential chemistry of heightened aural or visual stimulus. It could even be worse: your brain may well be releasing endorphins purely on the basis of an re-evocation of an irrational attachment you may have had (or continue to have) with the work of art that has arisen purely on the basis of proximity!
It seems to me that, increasingly, once you’ve overcome the barrier to entry that is the cost of hardware, the next challenge is to find a reliable, secure and affordable data package that permits you to take your business on the go.
I’m very satisfied with the devices that I’m using right now - a Galaxy Tab 10.1 with a knock-off bluetooth keyboard cover that provides a full, sturdy QWERTY keyboard and portable protection for the tablet. Paired with a 3G handset, it provides the potential for a pop-up media station, offering recording of video, voice and text. Distribution is a snap. This really does have the power to change things, if we could get these kinds of devices in the hands of journalists around the world. Of course, Twitter is helping - but the depth of analysis and detail it provides (little) is a bit disconcerting. It facilitates newsbites, when often, the story or the tale is infinitely more complex.
KeePass Password Safe is a free software password management utility for Microsoft Windows, with unofficial ports for Linux, Mac OS X, and a variety of other systems. (Wikipedia)
They way I like to use this password manager, to ensure I don’t get caught out when on the move or using public computers is as follows:
Store KeepPassX (cross-platform port) executables for as many flavours of OS as is possible on Google Drive
College Board CSS Funding Profile – $25 per university Graduate Records Examination – $170 Going to university in the States – priceless?