Audio-to-score alignment is a core task in MIR, but its application to music performance analysis is underexplored and it has not been developed for prospective users. Moreover, there have been very few user studies to shed light on the software needs of performance researchers. To help fill this gap, we present an open-source software application with a graphical UI that integrates audio-to-score alignment, designed to facilitate performance analysis. Working with Vamp plugins, this tool can also serve as a suitable platform for developing and comparing new alignment algorithms. In addition, in this paper we offer a use-case example of this tool comparing multiple performances of the same piece. We have also evaluated this tool with 15 prospective real-world users and received highly positive responses. Our user study suggests that tools like this can help bridge disciplinary divides between MIR and performance research.

The electroacoustic works of the Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) captivate with their radical ideas, sounds and compositional models. They were often conceived as multimedia works for specific locations and architectures. The richness of the approaches and processes gave rise to an extensive body of sources. Therefore, this volume is particularly dedicated to a philological approach, combining contributions by companions of Xenakis and renowned experts in Xenakis research with studies in philology of electroacoustic music. It concludes with a roundtable discussion of the performance of these electroacoustic works, thus linking the philological questions back to musical practice.

Für die Krankheitsverarbeitung und Erhaltung der psychischen Gesundheit spielen das Zusammenwirken von Medizin, Krankheitswahrnehmung und Musik sowie die Musik im Krankenhaussetting eine Rolle. Die als musikpädagogisches Seminar der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst am Comprehensive Center for Pediatrics (CCP) an der Universitätsklinik für Kinder- und Jugendheilkunde (UKKJ) Wien veranstaltete Musikwerkstatt You Smile richtet sich an Kinder und Jugendliche, die aufgrund schwerer und schwerster Erkrankungen für längere Zeit im Krankenhaus betreut werden müssen. Dieses pädagogische Projekt zielt darauf ab, Kindern zu zweit oder in Kleingruppensettings nicht nur einen Zugang zur Musik zu bieten, sondern sie auch in ihren musikalischen und sozialen Kompetenzen zu stärken und ihnen in einer schwierigen Lebensphase emotionale Unterstützung zu geben. Die Instrumentalpädagogik konzentriert sich traditionell auf den Unterricht in formellen Bildungseinrichtungen, so auch in diesem neuen edukativen, kommunikativen musikpädagogischen Kontext im Krankenhaussetting.

Am 28. September 2023 fand in der Aula am Campus der Universität Wien die „Tagung wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten und Hochschulschriften-Repositorien“, kurz tawiab2023, statt. Diese stand im Zeichen der Schwerpunkte Urheberrecht, Plagiatsprüfung, Ablieferung von Dissertationen an die Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Barrierefreiheit und Vergabe von DOIs.

Rechtspopulistische Bewegungen und Diskurse greifen auf neue, ästhetisierte Politikstile und bis dato links konnotierte, künstlerisch erprobte Provokationsformen zurück. Zudem besetzen sie Geschlecht, Familie und Sexualität als Trigger-Themen. Die Beiträger*innen bringen die Populismusforschung mit geistes- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Ansätzen zusammen und fokussieren dabei auf das kulturelle Feld und Geschlechterdiskurse als spezifische Aushandlungsterrains. Neben einer Analyse, wie der »rechtspopulistische Komplex« jeweils aktuelle gesellschaftliche Problemlagen instrumentalisiert, eröffnen sie auch Gegenstrategien im Sinne radikaldemokratischer und emanzipatorischer Politiken.

Municipal housing in Vienna, called Wiener Gemeindebau, is gaining new significance in research and cultural work in the discourse on affordable housing in the city and the increasing heterogeneity of urban life. However, it has also been a field imbued with the ideological projections, desires, and anxieties of various political parties. In the revival of the historical myth as a sociopolitical utopia of the so-called Red Vienna period and the simultaneous culturalization of conflicts and precarious living, municipal housing is a sensitive field within which questions of cultural coexistence are constantly negotiated. This article draws on insights gained through fieldwork in the context of the research project “Klingender Gemeindebau” (Sounding out municipal housing), which was conducted in the Anton-Figl-Hof, a medium-sized complex from the late 1950s in Vienna’s fourteenth district. Approaching municipal housing primary through the lens of music consumption, this study examines the potential of music for understanding neighborhood relationships and creating spaces for encounter: How does the diversity of origin, languages, age groups, and interests resonate in the musical preferences expressed by the residents? What role do sound and music play in everyday life and in the ways in which municipal housing is imagined and narrated by its residents? And how does public music consumption affect interpersonal relationships between so-called longtime and new tenants in providing space for both conflicts of non-belonging and inclusive forms of musical sociability?

Digital music encodings are machine-readable representations of music score documents. Beyond the visual information captured by score images or PDFs, music encodings explicitly capture the musical semantics of the score. This makes it possible to use them as research data objects for musicological analyses (Rizo & Marsden, 2019) and to build digital score interfaces for applications in music scholarship, rehearsal, and performance (Pugin, 2018). mei-friend is a friendly, interactive, browser-based editor for music encodings. It opens music encodings in a variety of formats and converts these to MEI, the XML-based format developed by the Music Encoding Initiative, a community of music scholars, librarians, and technologists. Alongside a rich set of interactive editing operations, mei-friend offers specialized functionalities targeted at music scholars, including panels to display facsimile score images and to author score annotations. Collaborative encoding practices are supported through integration with GitHub and Solid, and by remote configuration capabilities via hyperlink (URL parameters). Important MEI community resources are also integrated, supporting direct reference to documentation (Music Encoding Initiative, 2023) for currently-selected elements, and auto-completion and validation using the MEI-XML schema definitions. Also provided are curated links to openly-licensed reference music encodings. The editor targets an audience of music scholars, students, librarians, performers, and enthusiasts. It is not conceived as a replacement for commercial music notation software, but rather as a complement opening up the affordances of machine-readable semantic music encodings to a broader audience. Our tool is the only currently available editor with comprehensive, native MEI-editing support in Common Western Music Notation (CMN). Editing directly in MEI avoids conversion errors (due to bugs or inherent differences in supported features) from other formats while supporting interactive use of those capabilities of the MEI schema that other formats simply do not support, such as editorial markup, annotation, and facsimile integration.

This article focuses on four digital resources for researching nineteenth-century women in music. Two are over two decades old and hail from the German-speaking world: Musik(vermittlung) und Gender(forschung) im Internet (MuGI) and the Sophie Drinker Institut online lexicon. The remaining pair are emerging digital resources based in the United States: Art Song Augmented and the Boulanger Initiative Database (BID).

In this article, I argue that the dance practice of ‘Khaita – Joyful Dances’ has been intentionally designed as a mindfulness practice with the aim of fostering presence and awareness by the Dzogchen master Namkhai Norbu. The three Khaita principles of awareness (Dems, Gyu and Drig) revolve around aspects of proprioception, smooth movements, musicality, spatial and group awareness and guide dancers to the here and now. They demand non-judgmental, purposeful and non-reactive attention, hence mindfulness, that results in more mature states of awareness and presence.