Computational Musicology – Distant Reading of Sheet Music

Since Roberto Busa's pioneering work with the "Index Thomisticus", the Digital Humanities have had a strong focus on text-based media. Accordingly, encoding formats such as TEI and Franco Moretti's notion of "distant reading" have become part of the common DH narrative. As symbolic music, i.e music written down as notes, can be considered a specific form of "text", many methods and also challenges from the field of text analysis can be transferred to music as well. The lecture illustrates the evolution of empirical and computational approaches to musicology and gives an overview of digital tools and methods that can be used for the distant reading of sheet music.

Related work

• Burghardt, M. (2018). Digital Humanities in der Musikwissenschaft – Computergestützte Erschließungsstrategien und Analyseansätze für handschriftliche Liedblätter. In Bibliothek. Forschung und Praxis, Sonderheft “Digitale Forschungsinfrastruktur für die Musikwissenschaft” (Hrsg.: B. Wiermann & A. Bonte).
• Burghardt, M., & Lamm, L. (2017). Entwicklung eines Music Information Retrieval-Tools zur Melodic Similarity-Analyse deutsch-sprachiger Volkslieder. In M. Eibl & M. Gaedke (Eds.), INFORMATIK 2017, Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), Gesellschaft für Informatik – Workshop „Musik trifft Informatik“ (pp. 15–27). Bonn: Springer.
• Burghardt, M., & Spanner, S. (2017). Allegro: User-centered Design of a Tool for the Crowdsourced Transcription of Handwritten Music Scores. In Proceedings of the DATeCH (Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage) conference. ACM.
• Burghardt, M., Spanner, S., Schmidt, T., Fuchs, F., Buchhop, K., Nickl, M., & Wolff, C. (2017). Digitale Erschließung einer Sammlung von Volksliedern aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum. In Book of Abstracts, DHd 2017.
• Burghardt, M., Lamm, L., Lechler, D., Schneider, M., & Semmelmann, T. (2016). Tool based Identification of Melodic Patterns in MusicXML Documents. In Book of Abstracts of the International Digital Humanities Conference (DH).