Computer science professor Yucong Jiang recently received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to support her research to use AI for analyzing recorded musical performances.

Jiang’s Digital Humanities Advancement grant from the NEH will provide funding for her to develop an automated music annotation software tool that will assist music scholars, archivists, and musicians in studying and better understanding recorded musical performances.

Called Performance Precision Annotator, the tool integrates advanced artificial intelligence technologies into a user-friendly format that requires no programming skills to use.

The software will offer a replacement for traditional music analysis and editing software, which typically requires time-consuming manual annotation and doesn’t incorporate musical score information.

“I’m excited to work with an advisory board of specialists in musicology, digital humanities, and related fields,” Jiang said. “I hope this project will provide benefits to both musicians and scholars.”

Jiang anticipates that software will help scholars and other users analyze music with greater efficiency and accuracy, examine larger sets of performances, and discover patterns between performance and theory.

The tool will also allow musicians and instructors to review past rehearsals or performances more closely and make any needed adjustments.

When complete, the prototype will be offered online as an open-source tool for public use.