Announcement | 02. December 2025

Give us today our daily song: From hymns to YouTube and TikTok – Shortlist for the 4th Culture Music Award is published

By Dominik Leipold, M. Sc., M. A. and Dipl. Des. (FH) Sarah Pittroff, M. A.

Their research interests particularly touch on everyday cultural life and practices at the heart of our society: the shortlist for the Culture Music Awards 2025 honors projects dedicated to mass media. The spectrum of these media is broad, ranging from hymnals—both historical ones and ones whose musical notes are still sung in our churches today—to social media and YouTube, the “largest music archive of the present day.”

The jury for the 4th NFDI4Culture Music Awards, consisting of representatives from NFDI4Culture, the Society for Music Research (GfM), the German Music Council, and the Center for Music – Edition – Medien (ZenMEM), met last week and held lively discussions about the submissions received by November 9, 2025. The jury would like to highlight the following three projects on the NFDI4Culture Music Award shortlist: 

Aida Amiryan-Stein (Universität Paderborn): Neues Thüringer Choralbuch digital

As part of her master's thesis, Aida Amiryan-Stein is currently compiling a critical digital edition of the Neues Thüringer Choralbuch (New Thuringian Hymn Book, 1955, 6th edition 1990), a genre of modern music printing that can be found in the inventory of every church congregation and is used regularly in many places every day. Against this background, it seems long overdue to treat such an influential contemporary musical practice using the methods of basic musicological research that are taken for granted in other bodies of work. The often complex copyright situation is partly responsible for this, especially since some of the choral settings were written by composers of the 20th and 21st centuries. The project masterfully overcame this obstacle by obtaining a license for the 312 settings in question under the terms of CC-BY 4.0. This means that the MEI encodings can now be published freely in accordance with FAIR principles; the current status of the work is even being made available before the final thesis has been submitted.

The coding methodology itself clearly corresponds to the best practices developed by the international musicological community in recent years. The aim is to expand the corpus with harmonic annotations and to link it to similar, recently created corpora. Overall, the jury believes that the project opens up prospects for broad networking not only of research data, but also of academic researchers with artists of all levels of qualification.

Henrik Schuld (Hochschule für Musik Mainz, Abteilung Musiktheorie): ChoRA – Neuronale Rekonstruktion barocker Choralbücher

Henrik Schuld's master's thesis, submitted in fall 2024, aims to reconstruct the lost bass part of Johann Jacob Pagendarm's (1646–1706) choral book using machine-based methods that are as unbiased as possible, i.e., methods that do not involve any “post-composing” by a human subject. The philological starting point is the bass part of one of the 139 cantional movements, which was accidentally preserved due to a mix-up and allows conclusions to be drawn about the composer's compositional style. In the jury's opinion, the algorithm developed represents an extremely pragmatic approach to the use of artificial intelligence, combining deterministic, rule-based methods with the training of a neural network and applying them to the relevant aspects of the research subject. Thus, although the stylistically appropriate harmonic progression is determined heuristically, it is guaranteed that the output always follows simple compositional rules and conventions, such as avoiding parallels and harmonizing the final note with a chord in root position. Noteworthy are the easily understandable explanations of the architecture of the network, which is derived entirely from music-theoretical considerations.

The author himself describes the result as a prototype that can be expanded into a reference research tool, and is aiming to carry out the necessary evaluation, modularization, and documentation work. Since the composition of four-part choral movements remains a central component of basic musicology and music theory studies, this would provide higher education in particular with a new and modern teaching aid.

Christoph Hust (Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig): Musikalische Rezeptionsräume und Kommentarnetzwerke in digitalen Plattformen

The work of Christoph Hust's research group responds to a development whose framework conditions were only realized in the mid-2000s: the rapid emergence of a musical reception practice on video platforms on the Internet. The submission rightly describes YouTube as “the largest music archive of the present day,” providing fertile ground for “cultural dynamics” and “aesthetic debates” that urgently need to be researched using scientific methods. To tap into the data generated in the process, the YouTube Comment Miner tool was programmed, which, in addition to scraping and analysis, also allows for the protection of data privacy and personal rights through the integration of common anonymization procedures. The accompanying case studies on music from Studio Ghibli animated films and the computer game series The Legend of Zelda convinced the jury of the usefulness of the software modules already implemented.

The plan to extend functionality and research to the mega-platform TikTok, which has become equally significant, also received broad support. The project outline was able to dispel concerns that this expansion could be prevented due to commercial interests on the part of the new provider by describing two alternative work packages: the analysis of Instagram Reels and a focus on the scalability of YouTube videos with millions of comments. In any case, it can be assumed that numerous courses and research projects will benefit enormously from the planned open-source publication.

The NFDI4Culture Music Award is presented by the musicology community in NFDI4Culture and is intended to recognize music-related or musicological projects and undertakings that make a special contribution to the goals in the consortium's areas of responsibility. It was presented for the first time in 2022.