CORPUS studies have increasingly been of interest to music theorists, musicologists, and music psychology researchers, as is evident in the sheer number of excellent submissions to this special issue. The breadth and depth of these articles, as well as the insightful commentaries, make it seem only fitting to publish over two issues. The current issue contains five articles, eight commentaries, and one research report, and covers folk music, post-tonal music, jazz, Western art music, and the popular music found on Youtube. Eerola presents a model of melodic entropy that provides a nice framework for future information-theoretic work, while Roger Dean and Marcus Pearce present a new approach to modelling pitch-structure in post-tonal music. Frieler, Pfleiderer, Abeßer, and Zaddach give an analysis of jazz solos that demonstrates the role of a narrative arcs in improvisation. White and Quinn present a new corpus that makes use of vast compilations of web-based MIDI data, and demonstrates how such a corpus might be facilitate future musicological and music-theoretic research. Plazak focuses on Youtube as a corpus, and argues that the mutability of such a corpus facilitates our understanding of musical communication, as well as the important role of the listener in defining and re-defining such a dataset. It's encouraging to me both as an editor and practitioner of corpus methods that so many of those heavily involved with the field contributed to these two issues as either an author or a commentator.
This issue also brings a number of changes on other fronts. Firstly, Nicola Dibben and Renee Timmers, who served as the journal's editors since Volume 7, have completed their editorial terms. They oversaw the transformation of the journal into a new Open Journal Systems platform, and were able to consistently produce issues that set a very high standard. Under their leadership, the journal both increased its accessibility (we now average more than 1,500 visits a month from more than 50 countries) while producing high-level original research, as well as insightful commentaries, from some of the field's most promising and established scholars. I'm also pleased to announce that Daniel Müllensiefen of Goldsmiths, University of London will be joining me as co-editor beginning in Volume 11, No.3. Additionally, we are lucky to be joined by Kelly Jakubowski of Durham University and Suzie Capps of Goldsmiths, who will be working as editorial assistants.