Digital Musicology: An Introduction, Epistemology, and Practices

Lecture as part of the ‘Meet the Master’ series at Warsaw University.

Digital humanities and social sciences are moving towards digitising their sources, methods and tools. This includes the field of digital musicology, which has developed various practices since the mid-1990s, from the relatively simple use of tools (“soft digital musicology”) to the development of complex technologies for solving hard problems (“hard digital musicology”).

In this talk, I will introduce three aspects of my research. The first concerns the epistemology of digital musicology. What methods are used, on what sources, with what tools? The nature of the sources, between traces and artefacts, will also have to be examined. The second aspect concerns the methods themselves: why should we practise hard digital musicology? Can it really solve complex problems of musical analysis or knowledge modelling? Finally, the third aspect concerns practice. Can we develop technologies for research ourselves, and what environments and languages are available? What problems do we face in the fields of training and open science?