Musicology nowadays actively expresses the need to make significant progress in close collaboration with computational technologies.
For instance, the new COST Action “A new ecosystem of early music studies” (EarlyMuse, CA21161) “intends to chart new paths that will strengthen the unique place of early music in Europe, both in our intellectual and cultural practices and in its global appeal.” One underlying objective is related to the “preservation of musical heritage and accessibility to resources”: “an essential step towards enabling early music to participate in the cultural and creative industry dynamic is the development and construction of a platform that will enable the richness, diversity and complexity of the early music field to be visible and accessible,” “developing technologies adapted to a better preservation and dissemination of a rich and diversified musical heritage.” “Through its work on ontologies, data mining, the law of musical works and their distribution, the foundations of a new type of platform dedicated to early music will be laid.” Particular actions is to “think about the automated mining of musical data, primarily symbolic (digital scores), in connection with audio” as well as the “use of Digital Humanities tools applied to the cataloguing, reproduction, study, and dissemination of music sources.” (from the Memorandum of Understanding of the COST Action)
Computational musicology is a vibrant and exciting domain of research, which played a core role in the creation of ISMIR and is currently represented, among other, by the IMS Study Group in Digital Musicology, by the annual international conference on Digital Library for Musicology (DLfM) and by the Music Encoding Initiative conference and interest groups.
However the dialog between musicology and computational musicology needs to be fostered even further, especially in the context of the exciting current collaborative developments. The aim of the proposed new initiative is to instigate close and active collaborations between musicology and MIR, through the development of a series of actions:
- Bringing together musicologists and MIR researchers willing to develop further the interdisciplinary dialog, as well as the experts at the transdisciplinary junction, i.e., computational musicologists.
- Working together on specific topics and developing concrete and thorough collaborations, via an online Slack workspace, with structured channels related to various topics (cf. below).
- Stimulating the dialog through online meetings, and the organisation of a hybrid event, planned for late Spring 2023 in Oslo, covering travel expenses for a selected group of presenters.
- Aiming towards the publication of articles resulting from the common work carried out through these different actions. Preparing articles for a journal special issue and/or for an edited book.
The EarlyMuse COST Action offers a timely incentive for such collaboration, especially around the following topics (which do not need to restrict solely on early music):
- Digital catalogues/libraries: state of the art, computational issues related to creation, management, sustainability, etc.
- Automation of digitization of manuscripts
- Metadata: Creation, management, interoperability, reusability, etc.
- Computational platforms to preserve and make accessible music heritage
- Computational music analysis
- Links with cultural and creative industry
- And any other relevant topics
Are you a computational musicologist? A MIR researchers interested in musicology? A musicologists interested in computational technologies? You are warmly invited to participate to this network, by joining the Slack workspace.
If you face any issue in using Slack, don’t hesitate to contact me.
There are very close deadlines (December 15 and 16) for some great opportunities of collaboration, so let’s start the discussion right away!