I enjoyed the variety of interesting tools that are gathered on Bamboo Dirt, but as I browsed around I noticed that many of the tools dealt with audio from the angle of text transcription, oral histories, etc. There are some music-specific tools, but I noticed that there is currently no category for audio (although there is a tag). It’s no surprise that these tools tend to be focused on text, but there are several developing tools that work with music notation and audio that I believe belong in such a collection of tools.
Here’s where the open nature of the tool set in Bamboo Dirt is welcome. I signed up for an account, identified a couple key tools which I thought would be useful to list, and within minutes had my contributions up on the site. I added links for music21, Soundflower, and the Music Encoding Intiative (MEI). I also emailed the admins, asking them about adding “audio” and “music” to the categories list. They were very responsive, and promised to include the idea in the next site update. It’s important to be able to distinguish between general audio tools and music-specific ones. It’s also important to include tools for working with notated music.
I wasn’t really surprised that music apps didn’t have that strong a presence - music often has to play catch-up, and the specialized requirements of music audio and music notation aren’t always well-understood. There is a growing field of sound studies and sound art, and work in these areas is increasingly interdisciplinary. I look forward to exploring ways to increase the interoperability of music and sound with other disciplines, and that is one of my personal goals in this project, in gaining experience with other technologies - to learn how to take them back to integrate with projects in music and sound.
