The research of Prof. dr. Emile Wennekes currently revolves around three projects, two of them entail book contracts.
1) Springer Nature
-Anupam Biswas, Emile Wennekes, Alicja Wieczorkowska, and Tzung-Pei Hong (eds.), Advances in Speech and Music Technology: Modelling, Computation and Cognition. New York: Springer Nature, 2020 (in press).
Speech and music are two prominent research areas in the domain of sound analysis, often studied under the subareas of audio signal processing. With recent advancements in speech and music technology, the area has grown manifold, bringing together the interdisciplinary researchers of computer science, cognitive science, sound analysis and musicology. How hearing works and how the brain processes sounds entering the ear to provide the listener with useful information are of great interest to cognitive scientists and musicians. Sound waves propagate through various media and allow communication or entertainment for humans. The music we hear or create can be perceived in variables such as rhythm, melody, pitch, harmony, timbre, or mood. The multifaceted nature of speech or music information requires algorithms and systems using sophisticated signal processing, and machine learning techniques to better extract valuable information. This book provides both profound technological knowledge and comprehensive treatment of essential topics in speech and music processing.
Springer New York series Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing.
2) Palgrave MacMillan
-Emile Wennekes & Emilio Audissino (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Music in Comedy Cinema. New York & London, 2022/23 (forthcoming)
Historically, the examination and theorisation of the use of music in films has addressed its presence in dramas – ‘serious’ films – while fewer accounts are available on what types of music is utilised in comedies and what functions it performs. As Hollywood cinema has been the benchmark and principal terrain of inquiry, this factual unbalance can be partly due to the scarce presence of music in the classical Hollywood comedies – for example, the iconic 1930s screewballs – compared to the fantasy/adventure/drama films of the same era, in which the fathers of Hollywood music – Steiner, Korngold, Newman… – thrived and set the foundations of the practice, and from which the first film-music scholars launched the discipline. The lack of scholarly attention, can also be due to the fact that comedies, having to deal with laughter and lighter situations instead of the graver and more existentially compelling narratives of dramas, have been seen as less reputable objects of study, less worthy of being taken seriously by academics. This collection of essays aims at investigating the presence, nature, and function of music in the comedy film from fresh perspectives, in order to contribute to a re-evaluation of film-music studies by casting more light on the more neglected comedic department.
3) Member of the NWO-Comenius funded project A New Generation of Music Professionals (a collaboration between the University of Amesterdam and the conservatopires of Utrecht and Amsterdam; run tim01-09-2020 tot 01-01-2024)
This project offers a pathway towards a solution for a fundamental problem faced in higher music education. It addresses the dichotomy between on the one hand the teaching of music through the practice ('musical craftmanship’), fostered at the conservatoires and on the other hand the scientific disciplines surrounding music, based at the university (f.e. musicology, music philosophy, music psychology, music sociology, acoustics, etc). With this project we try to bridge the gap between four Dutch organizations for Higher Music Eduation.
NB Emile Wennekes founded and chairs the Study Group Music and Media (MaM) under the auspices of the International Musicological Society.
Completed Projects
Project
The Impact of Sound Recording on Persian Musical Culture, 1900-1960
01.01.2010
to 01.01.2014
General project description
The process of recording music introduced profound changes into music culture in general that musicology is only beginning to address systematically in recent years; in the case of Persia, recording , among other elements, influenced instruments, musical forms, performing styles and the social life of musicians. It is clear at present, at least to a certain extent, where and when recordings were made (generating a full bibliographical record remains work-in-progress), and we know that the venues of music-making changed dramatically in those years (for example, coffeehouses came to use record players instead of having live musicians play). What is required now is to clarify how the formative influence exerted by the recording process spread from the recording studio to the music (repertoire, instruments, style), the musicians (their social position, ranking, gender), and to society (venues, tastes) through the increased use of mechanically reproducible music. Thus, it may be argued that the recording process was a turning point in the evolution of Persian musical culture, at least certainly in urban settings.
Role
Researcher
Funding
Utrecht University OGC PhD International Scholarship
Project members UU
External project members
- Dr. Eckhard Neubauer
- Prof. Anthony Seeger
Wennekes' present research focuses on two areas: Mediatizing Music. He is currently preparing a book on the first. He initiated and chairs the Study Group Music and Media (MaM) under the auspices of the International Musicological Society (IMS) and coordinates the annual conferences of MaM on three continents.
Music plays an important role in media, both in old and certainly in new media: commercials, games, films, ring tones and the like. The other way around, media play an increasing role in music. They have changed the compositional process and characteristics of style; media severely influences performances, composing techniques, the way of recording and visualizing music. What are the theoretical and philosophical consequences of mediatized music? What are the economics behind these processes of mediatization? What role does the process of ‘remidiation’, from LP to MP3 and 4, play? How has mediatization influenced performance practice, what was the ‘phonograph effect?’ What do processes of mediatizing music mean in terms of ‘liveness’, ‘animated liveness’