Digital musicology syllabus

Other syllabuses can be found here.

Digital musicology (DM) – what the hell is it? It can be defined as a sub-field of musicology focusing on computers, software and digital tools to facilitate research. In that way, it is closely linked to the broader digital humanities field. Here are some texts I’ve found useful to date in my digital musicology research.

Foundational ideas

Bel, Bernard, and Bernard Vecchione. “Computational Musicology.” Computers and the Humanities 27, no. 1 (1993): 1–5.

Pugin, Laurent. “The Challenge of Data in Digital Musicology.” Frontiers in Digital Humanities 2 (2015). https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2015.00004.

Pugin, a director of RISM, outlines some challenges that continue in DM, including a lack of quality machine-readable data sources.

Tzanetakis, George, Ajay Kapur, W. Andrew Schloss, and Matthew Wright. “Computational Ethnomusicology.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies 1, no. 2 (2007): 1–24.

Applications of DM

Rose, Stephen, Sandra Tuppen, and Loukia Drosopoulou. “Writing a Big Data History of Music.” Early Music 43, no. 4 (2015): 649–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cav071.

A Big Data History of Music is a project by Royal Holloway and the British Library. The project involved taking vast amounts of bibliographic data from the British Library and RISM, and analysing it for historical trends with respect to publishing. This accessible article demonstrates how the use of digital tools and software can facilitate musicological research that would otherwise be impractical.

Other relevant texts

Good, Michael. “MusicXML: An Internet-Friendly Format for Sheet Music.” In XML 2001 Conference Proceedings, 2001.

Lee, Brent. “Issues Surrounding the Preservation of Digital Music Documents.” Archivaria 50 (2000): 193–204.

Selfridge-Field, Eleanor, ed. Beyond MIDI: The Handbook of Musical Codes. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997.