Making Musicology in a Digital Age

What does the study of music look like in an age of ubiquitous data? How have we collected and categorized music, in all its richness? And how can digital tools help us understand musical style and structure, particularly when it comes to the music of the distant past? As my host Philippe Vendrix explains in the introduction to EarlyMuse (https://earlymuse.eu/; a major European Cooperation in Science and Technology [COST] project), the field of early music has always been marked by hybridity: a meeting ground of theory and practice, of scholarship and performance, of the material and the immaterial. Now the digital turn in scholarship, and the central place of digital media in culture more broadly, bring new opportunities and challenges to this mix.
The experimental basis of my project, briefly stated, is to find ways to advance two key axes—one technical, the other social. Thus, one portion of my work will focus on “music as data” and “data about music” at both micro and macro levels of detail. During this phase of work, I will advance techniques for the curation of quality data, the development of algorithms and machine learning systems for music, and the elaboration of systems for mapping and linking knowledge.  But I will also help seasoned professionals and aspiring graduate students alike direct this kind of “applied human intelligence” to the machine tools that increasingly mediate our experience with all forms of culture, and that shape knowledge systems, too. If musicology is to succeed in a digital age, we will need to involve digital natives in this work. And if young musicologists are to succeed in the rapidly changing landscape of the academy and culture industry more broadly, they will need to hone digital skills early in their careers