Prof Tim Crawford
Staff details

Professor Tim Crawford worked for 15 years as a professional musician before becoming an academic.
Beginning in the 1990s at King’s College, University of London, where he worked in the Music Department and with the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, he has been involved with the use of computers in the service of musicology.
He set up an international project in music information retrieval, Online Music Searching And Retrieval (OMRAS) and established the Electronic Corpus of Lute Music, which has received funding from the AHRC.
He is currently Principal Investigator of the AHRC Digital Transformations project Transforming Musicology, involving over 15 researchers and three PhD students at Goldsmiths, Oxford, Queen Mary, Lancaster and Utrecht universities. His latest project, also funded by the AHRC, is Learn To Play, which uses machine-learning technology and the experience of working with historical music to grade pieces for online learning and to generate exercises to help students with their instrumental practice.
Research Interests
- Computational approaches to musicology
- Music history, especially of the 16th to 18th centuries
- Music for the western lute
- Musical performances on record
Publications and research outputs
Edited Book
Crawford, Tim, ed. 2011. Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750): Sämtliche Were für Laute, vol. 10 (transcription). Cassel, Germany: Das Erbe deutscher Musik, Sonderreihe, Bände 16, Bärenreiter Verlag. ISBN 9790006018079
Book Section
Crawford, Tim. 2022. Luise Gottsched: Lute-playing heroine of her Age. In: Andreas Schlegel, ed. ... in der verlorene Paradies: Festschrift in memoriam Annette Otterstedt. Menziken, Switzerland: The Lute Corner, pp. 224-279. ISBN 9783952323243
Crawford, Tim; Pickens, J. and Wiggins, Geraint. 2006. Dimensionality Reduction in Harmonic Modeling for Music Information Retrieval. In: Richard Kronland-Martinet; Thierry Voinier and Sylvi Ystad, eds. Computer Music Modeling and Retrieval. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 233-248. ISBN 03029743
Article
Crawford, Tim. 2020. Silvius Leopold Weiss and the Improvised Prelude. Journal of the Lute Society fo America, 53, pp. 105-144. ISSN 0076-1524
Sutcliffe, Richard; Hovy, Eduard; Collins, Tom; Wan, Stephen; Crawford, Tim and Root, Deane. 2019. Searching for musical features using natural language queries: the C@merata evaluations at MediaEval. Language Resources and Evaluation, 53(1), pp. 87-140. ISSN 1574-020X
Weigl, David M.; Lewis, David; Crawford, Tim; Knopke, Ian and Page, Kevin R.. 2017. On providing semantic alignment and unified access to music library metadata. International Journal on Digital Libraries, 20(1), pp. 25-47. ISSN 1432-5012
Lewis, David; Crawford, Tim and Müllensiefen, Daniel. 2016. Instrumental idiom in the 16th century: embellishment patterns in arrangements of vocal music. Proceedings of the 17th conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval, pp. 524-530.
Crawford, Tim and Lewis, Richard. 2016. Music Encoding Initiative (Digital and Multimedia Scholarship). Journal of the American Musicological Society, 69(1), pp. 273-285. ISSN 0003-0139
Lewis, Richard; Crawford, Tim and Lewis, David. 2015. Exploring information retrieval, semantic technologies and workflows for music scholarship: the Transforming Musicology project. Early Music, 43(4), pp. 635-647. ISSN 0306-1078
Proutskova, Polina; Rhodes, Christophe; Crawford, Tim and Wiggins, Geraint. 2013. Breathy, Resonant, Pressed - Automatic Detection Of Phonation Mode From Audio Recordings of Singing. Journal of New Music Research, 42(2), pp. 171-186. ISSN 0929-8215
De Roure, David; Page, Kevin R.; Fields, Ben; Crawford, Tim; Downie, J. Stephen and Fujinaga, Ichiro. 2011. An e-Research approach to Web-scale music analysis. Philosophical transactions. Series A, Mathematical, physical, and engineering sciences, 369(1949), pp. 3300-3317. ISSN 1364-503X
Rhodes, Christophe; Crawford, Tim; Casey, Michael A. and d'Inverno, Mark. 2010. Investigating music collections at different scales with AudioDB. Journal of New Music Research, 39(4), pp. 337-348. ISSN 0929-8215
Crawford, Tim. 2009. Silvius Leopold Weiss and the Dresden and London Manuscripts of His Music. Journal of the Lute Society of America, 39, pp. 1-64. ISSN 0076-1526
Casey, Michael A. and Crawford, Tim. 2004. Automatic Location and Measurement of Ornaments in Audio Recordings. International Conference on Music Information Retrieval,
Pickens, Jeremy; Bello, Juan Pablo; Monti, Giuliano; Sandler, Mark; Crawford, Tim and Dovey, Matthew. 2003. Polyphonic Score Retrieval Using Polyphonic Audio Queries: A Harmonic Modeling Approach. Journal of New Music Research, 32(2), pp. 223-236. ISSN 09298215
Conference or Workshop Item
Crawford, Tim; Lewis, David and Porter, Alastair. 2023. 'Exploring early vocal music and its lute arrangements: Using F-TEMPO as a musicological tool'. In: 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM 2023). Milan, Italy 10 November 2023.
Cannam, Chris; Lewis, David and Crawford, Tim. 2023. 'ECOLM and Lute Tablature'. In: 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM 2023). Milan, Italy 10 November 2023.
Porter, Alastair; Crawford, Tim and Lewis, David. 2023. 'End-to-end loading of new music libraries to F-Tempo via IIIF'. In: 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM 2023). Milan, Italy 10 November 2023.
Lewis, David; Crawford, Tim and Badkobeh, Golnaz. 2023. 'Corpus-building and corpus-based musicology for the Early Modern Period: Towards a complete Electronic Corpus of Lute Music... and beyond'. In: International Colloquium of Computational and Cognitive Musicology 2023. Athens, Greece 22-24 June 2023.
Weigl, David M.; Goebl, Werner; Baker, David J.; Crawford, Tim; Zubani, Federico; Gkiokas, Aggelos; Gutierrez, Nicolas F.; Porter, Alastair and Santos, Patricia. 2021. 'Notes on the Music: A social data infrastructure for music annotation'. In: 8th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM2021). Virtual Conference, GA, United States 28-30 July 2021.
Crawford, Tim; Badkobeh, Golnaz and Lewis, David. 2018. 'Searching Page-Images of Early Music Scanned with OMR: A Scalable Solution Using Minimal Absent Words'. In: 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. Paris, France 24-27 September 2018.
Crawford, Tim; Badkobeh, Golnaz and Lewis, David. 2018. 'Searching Page-Images of Early Music Scanned with OMR: A Scalable Solution Using Minimal Absent Words'. In: Proceedings of the 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, ISMIR 2018, Paris, France, September 23-27, 2018. Paris, France 23 – 27 September 2018.
Sutcliffe, Richard; Crawford, Tim; Fox, Chris; Root, Deane L.; Hovy, Eduard and Lewis, Richard. 2015. 'Relating Natural Language Text to Musical Passages'. In: Proceedings of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval. Malaga, Spain.
Weigl, David M.; Lewis, David; Crawford, Tim and Page, Kevin R.. 2015. 'Expert-guided semantic linking of music-library metadata for study and reuse'. In: International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology. Knoxville, TN, United States.
Lewis, David; Lewis, Richard and Crawford, Tim. 2015. 'MEI for lute music'. In: Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference (MEC 2015). Florence, Italy.
Lewis, David; Lewis, Richard and Crawford, Tim. 2015. 'MEI for lute music'. In: Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference (MEC 2015). Florence, Italy.
Müllensiefen, Daniel; Baker, David; Lewis, Richard; Rhodes, Christophe; Fields, Ben and Crawford, Tim. 2014. 'Multi-modal Musical Performance Capture'. In: Digital Music Research Network (DMRN+9). London, United Kingdom.
Crawford, Tim; Fields, Ben; Lewis, David and Page, Kevin R.. 2014. 'Explorations in Linked Data practice for early music corpora'. In: Digital Libraries 2014. London, United Kingdom 8 - 12 September 2014.
Rhodes, Christophe; Crawford, Tim and d'Inverno, Mark. 2014. 'Duplicate detection in facsimile scans of early printed music'. In: European Conference on Data Analysis. Bremen, Germany 2 - 4 July 2014.
Müllensiefen, Daniel; Baker, David; Rhodes, Christophe; Crawford, Tim and Dreyfus, Laurence. 2014. 'Recognition of leitmotives in Richard Wagner's music: chroma distance and listener expertise'. In: European Conference on Data Analysis. Bremen, Germany 2 - 4 July 2014.
Proutskova, Polina; Rhodes, Christophe; Wiggins, Geraint and Crawford, Tim. 2012. 'Breathy or Resonant - A Controlled and Curated Dataset for Phonation Mode Detection in Singing'. In: International Conference on Music Information Retrieval. Porto, Portugal.
Fields, Ben; Page, Kevin R.; De Roure, David and Crawford, Tim. 2011. 'The Segment Ontology: Bridging Music-generic and Domain-specific'. In: IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, 3rd International Workshop on Advances in Music Information Research. Barcelona, Spain.
Page, Kevin R.; Fields, Ben; Nagel, Bart J.; O'Neill, Gianni; Roure, David C. De and Crawford, Tim. 2010. 'Semantics for Music Analysis through Linked Data: How Country is My Country?'. In: Sixth IEEE e–Science conference. Brisbane, Australia.
Crawford, Tim; Mauch, Matthias and Rhodes, Christophe. 2010. 'Recognising Classical Works in Historical Recordings'. In: Proceedings of 11th Conference of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval. Utrecht, Netherlands.
Report
Crawford, Tim. 2007. Transcription of the Dresden Manuscript of the lute works of S. L. Weiss (1687-1750), Parts 1 and 2. Other. Baerenreiter.
Crawford, Tim. 2002. Facsimile and introductory study of the Dresden Manuscript of lute works by S. L. Weiss, Parts 1 and 2. Other. Baerenreiter.