THIS issue marks the second of two special issues focusing on corpus approaches to musicological and music-theoretical research. What began as a simple call for papers turned into a fairly ambitious project, and I couldn't be more pleased with the result. The range and depth of the articles in these two issues demonstrates the level of scholarly work being conducted in this growing area of research. In this issue, Derek Strykowski's article on text-painting in Marenzio's madrigals provides a model for how one might search address the often difficult-to-test notion of text-painting, and Craig Sapp's commentary is a nice supplemental discussion of the topic, offering avenues of future research. Fernando Benadon's analysis of roughly 30,000 onset times in Afro-Cuban drumming focuses on the notion of "near onsets" and "onset clusters", and Peter Marten's commentary argues that, while this might be difficult to perceive, the methodology demonstrates an excellent model for future research. Steven Cannon's analysis of the form of 19th-century symphonies is enlightening, and provides a nice empirical backing to much of the extant literature on the repertoire, and Ben Duane's response provides a nice commentary on future directions and possible methodological improvements. Caitlyn Trevor and David Huron's article on the usage of open strings in nominally sad music deftly bridges emotion research and instrumental affordances, and Daniel Müllensiefen's commentary praises the methodology, laments the negative results, and issues a call for more negative results to be published.
Perhaps the most unique aspect of Empirical Musicology Review is the "open peer review" format it pioneered a decade ago. This issue contains a number of commentaries —and responses to commentaries— that fit within that vision. Nat Condit-Schultz and Mitch Ohriner take two fascinating but different approaches to the notion of "flow" in hip-hop, and provide insightful commentaries for one another, while Jacob Gran's commentary offers a nice overview of both approaches. Joseph Daniele lays out a framework for using nPVI for historical research, and Leigh VanHandel's alternative reading of the data is fascinating. Daniele's response is thoughtful and thorough, and the exchange really illustrates the scholarly back-and-forth that this journal was meant to foster.