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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.
Blog
I’m a sometime listener of John Schaefer’s New Sounds podcast. He has a particularly eclectic taste of wide reknown.
Sometimes a recording of the show is posted online, but this is far from often the case.
However, blog posts corresponding to each show include the tracklist for each show as a HTML element.
Therefore, it is trivial to write a scraper that iterates through the back-catalog of tracklists. This scraper outputs a CSV file.
You have to go to come back, I suppose. And so I have done both of these things. I spent this summer mostly in and around Ireland, and partly in Dresden, Germany.
Trying different combinations of transport from the airport, I took the LIRR to Penn Station and got a cab with my gigantic luggage (wasn’t fancying the subway on a Friday afternoon).
After taking the West Side Highway, the taxi driver wisely bailed out at around 79th Street at the sight of congestion there and (comparatively) sailed up West End Avenue, mitigating the Manhattan midday madness somewhat.
A couple of nights ago I had the dubious pleasure of a musical performance at 4 a.m. in the morning, awake when ought to have been sleeping, roused precisely by the auditory phenomenon that captured my attention. A system of several gigantic thunderstorms, larger than any I’d ever experienced my life, trundled over and around Dresden for about a half an hour bringing with them an unignorable musical event. The sheer volume of each thunderclap was such that I felt it not only in my “ears” (whatever that means) but also in my head, my chest, my whole body.
I am shamelessly quoting Daniel Dennett at length here, in his formulation of Rapoport’s Rules.
The best antidote I know for [a] tendency to caricature one’s opponent is a list of rules promulgated many years ago by social psychologist and game theorist Anatol Rapoport.
How to compose a successful critical commentary:
Attempt to re-express your target’s position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says: “Thanks, I wish I’d thought of putting it that way.
A simple way to write about modulations and the pivot chords which can help effect them using nothing but ASCII.
Use braces and brackets to distinguish the controlling tonality. Use (tonic, mode) notation where: tonic is in [C, C sharp, D flat …] mode is in [-, +] For example:
(C, +):{[VI;II} -> V -> I]:(G, +)
reads in plain English:
A modulation is effected from C major to G major by the pivot chord VI in C major which is II in G major (which progreses to a tonicisation of G major)
Reading Justin London in class this week. Checking out his website I found a link to a curated Excel sheet of pop songs with what he calls “metric fake-outs”, or metrically ambiguous openings. Using Ivy, I converted the source file (available here) into a public Spotify playlist which is available here.
Credit: Justin London (homepage)
I’ve kept it no secret from myself that the time is ripe to buy a new laptop. During the summer, the screen of my 2009 MacBook Core 2 Duo started behaving badly. Strictly speaking, it’s the backlight or the inverter which delivers power to it which is giving me bother. It was the first Mac I’d owned (having had a PC laptop to call my own before then) and I found it a natural transition because of an interest in Linux.
Motivation I am, as of late, frequently in receipt of PDFs containing scanned images of text from diverse sources.
There are at least two things that I like to do with these PDFs: one is to optimise them for use with an ebook. I use the excellect k2pdfopt to achieve this end. The other is to OCR them for personal use, particularly for journal aricles for which the text content of PDFs is garbled to such an extent it is impossible to add highlight annotations.
It has been a great privilege of mine to have been offered a place on an integrated masters’-doctorate programme awarded by the graduate school in the arts at Columbia University in the City of New York. From this September, I will take courses in a variety of music theory and music-related topics with a focus first on tonal analysis.
I’ve just spent the last week or so moving from a small town on the west coast of Ireland to the English–speaking world’s most well known metropoles.
I would like to investigate the usefulness of an ‘agile’ methodology for producing academic work. The familiar mantra ‘release early; iterate often’ applies and the output is a short (and growing) “research brief” of 800-2000 words. Such an output should have all the citations and references necessary to aid the curious referee or reader and should not shy away from tackling highly-specialised problems or areas of interest within the field. The briefs should be version-controlled, publicly available and open for discussion and comment, particularly with a view to emendation or the co-ordination of a longer study which may expand upon the topics explored in the seed brief.