2024-02-02 18:35:29
Digitization and classification according to musical expression of emotions from 3,000 scores of arias from 18th century operas, 90% of them unpublished, shows that love is represented with a slow tempo and simple orchestrations, with violins and flutes, while anger is speed, major tonalities and vocal leaps.
They are findings from the Complutense University of Madrid and the Complutense Institute of Musical Sciences, which have recovered and digitized the largest collection of arias to the present day in the Didone Project, developed over five years by a team of musicologists, philologists and data scientists on operas composed with texts by Metastasio, the most popular librettist of his century.
Qualified by the Complutense as one of the biggest musicological projects of the decadestarting April 12 (anniversary of the poet’s death), musicians, singers, researchers and music lovers will be able to access thousands of unpublished arias for free from their computers or phones.
In addition to the usual composer criteriathe Didone platform allows you to search for arias based on the emotion expressed, the vocal register, the instrumentation, the tonality, the singer who premiered it, the tempo or the beat.
“We start from the basis that music is abstract and therefore it is very difficult to identify emotionsso we have classified them into the dramatic action of the works, a dramaturgical analysis of how the characters express their emotions,” Álvaro Torrente, principal investigator of the project, explained to EFE.
The uniqueness of its you are the body that metastases (1698-1782), imperial poet for half a century in Vienna, wrote librettos that were adapted in more than 100 different versions by composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Christian Bach, Christoph Willibald Gluck, Josef Mysliveček (represented in the film ‘Il Boemo ‘), Nicola Porpora, Leonardo Leo, Johann Adolf Hasse, Baldassarre Galuppi, Niccolò Jommelli and Davide Perez, among many others.
His first opera was ‘Didone abbandonata’, which gives its name to the project. During the middle of the 18th century, 30% of the operas made in Europe had a libretto by Metastasio, including Spain. However, the only canonical one today is ‘La clemenza di Tito’, by Mozart.
Anger and pity, the most common emotions
What the researchers have done is compare how different composers set the same aria and its dramatic action to music according to the principles of Descartes’ treatise “The Passions of the Human Soul.”
“Each composer does things in an original way and has his characteristics“says Torrente, and they can deviate from the norm because they are worse, because they want to be original, or even because they are geniuses (from that century Mozart, Händel and Gluck survive today).
But they have found tendencies in some emotions, like love is expressed with a slower tempo and simpler orchestration, for example only with violins or flutes, and with major keys and small intervals. But not too small, because if they are, they will also imply pain and pity for the suffering.
Anger has its musical manifestation in fast times, major tonalities and vocal leaps, a kind of lack of control in loud arias. As for tonalities, although musical theory maintains that there are some specific ones, they maintain that this is not true, and that the same emotion can be expressed in 8, 12 or 15 different tonalities, says Torrente.
The two emotions most represented in these operas are anger and pity -which according to Descartes is love with sadness- while the least abundant is joy, since the scripts usually describe conflictive situations.
Open path to artificial intelligence
This work hopes to be basis for new explorations, for example in the development of Artificial Intelligence and its analysis of scores in digital format, to further automate what more than thirty researchers participating in the project have analyzed in these five years. There have been 200 operas with music by 300 composers based on Metastasio’s 26 librettos.
Recognized by the European Research Council as an example of avant-garde in the musical field, it has been funded with an Advanced Grant of 2.5 million euros.
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