The Rest is Silence: Leveraging Unseen Species Models forComputational Musicology
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For many decades, musicologists have engaged in creating large databases serving different purposes for musicological research and scholarship. With the rise of fields like music information retrieval and digital musicology, there is now a constant and growing influx of musicologically relevant datasets and corpora. In historical or observational settings, however, these datasets are necessarily incomplete, and the true extent of a collection of interest remains unknown — silent. Here, we apply so-called Unseen Species models (USMs) from ecology to areas of musicological activity. After introducing the models formally, we show in four case studies how USMs can be applied to musicological data to address quantitative questions like: How many composers are we missing in RISM? What percentage of medieval sources of Gregorian chant have we already cataloged? How many differences in music prints do we expect to find between editions? How large is the coverage of songs from genres of a folk music tradition? And, finally, how close are we in estimating the size of the harmonic vocabulary of a large number of composers?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".