THIS issue of Empirical Musicology Review contains a range of articles spanning topics such as music and copyright, information-based models of Bach's Art of Fugue, corpus construction, and a replication study investigating pattern learning.
In their article, Paz, Knights, Padilla and Tidhar explore the role of entropy in examining the similarity of various reconstructions of musical lines in Bach's opening of Contrapunctus XIV. In her commentary on the article, Stefanie Acevedo writes that while such an approach can be powerful, the specifics of how it is used must be defined quite clearly, and questions the utility of these specific findings.
In his fascinating study of whosampled.com, Jeremy Orosz explores which types of entries are likely to be most accurate and why, while Trevor de Clercq and Deborah Wagnon's commentary on the article argues that while this is a very useful resource, an understanding of copyright law is helpful for users wanting to engage with the site.
Nicholas Shea's data report provides a useful approach to representation in corpora, discussing how one might be more intentional in the demographics of the artists sampled, focusing specifically on popular music.
Friedman, Kowalewski, and Song's research report provides a fascinating attempt to replicate Crespo-Bojorque and Toro's (2016) article on the role of integer-ratio dyads and patterns on learning. The authors were unable to replicate the original study, but found that non-musicians demonstrated some initial advantage.
This issue also contains our first Letter to the Editor, in which David Huron calls for an end to citations to his prolactin theory of musical sadness, as it continues to be cited, despite being disproven. It's a fascinating example of the iterative process of scholarship. We welcome additional letters to the editors moving forward.
On a personal note, this is Daniel Shanahan's last issue as co-editor of Empirical Musicology Review. He began working with the journal in 2012 as a managing editor under the leadership of editors Renee Timmers and Nicola Dibben, then becoming co-editor in 2017 alongside Daniel Müllensiefen. In that time, he oversaw ten volumes of the journal and dozens of articles and commentaries. Daniel Shanahan will stay on as a member of the editorial board; Niels Chr. Hansen will be taking over for him as co-editor, and Daniel Müllensiefen will stay on as co-editor.
