LibGuides: Music: Digital Musicology

Introduction

Digital musicology can be understood as a branch of digital humanities focusing on musical topics. Sometimes referred to as Computational Musicology, Digital Musicology has been defined as the study of music with computational modeling and simulation, or musicologically relevant research using quantitative and computational methodologies. Examples take on a variety of forms and styles, not limited to digital editions, sound archives, computational analysis, etc. Project types include creating copora of digital collections, corpus-specific research, development of digital tools and encoding standards, utilization of digital tools in composition, and using digital tools to inform, illuminate, or recreate performance practice.

Projects: A Sampling

Cantigas de Santa Maria for Singers
A complete edition of the lyrics and music of the 13th century Cantigas de Santa Maria of Alfonso X El Sabio, specially prepared for singers and instrumentalists.
Cantus: A Database for Latin Ecclesiastical Chant - Inventories of Chant Sources
Cantus is a database of the Latin chants found in manuscripts and early printed books, primarily from medieval Europe. This searchable digital archive holds inventories of antiphoners and breviaries -- the main sources for the music sung in the Latin liturgical Office -- as well as graduals and other sources for music of the Mass.
Cantus Index: Online Catalogue for Mass and Office Chants
Cantus Index is a catalogue of chant texts and melodies for Office and Mass. Multiple online medieval music databases have been connected together through unique "Cantus ID numbers" enabling searching across platforms.
DIAMM (the Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music)
Images and metadata for thousands of medieval manuscripts; scholarly resources and editions; digital restorations.
MMMO Database Medieval Music Manuscripts Online Database
International virtual library of music sources and notated manuscripts of Western language from the medieval period up to 1600.
REFRAIN Music, Poetry, Citation: The Medieval Refrain
A searchable database of thirteenth century musico-poetic refrains, motets, narratives, songs and other genres.
The Experience of Worship in late medieval Cathedral and Parish Church
This website enables you to explore questions about late medieval religious buildings and the rituals and worship that took place in them.
Extraordinary Sensescapes: The Sensual World of Late Medieval Nuns
New technology facilitating total-immersion virtual-reality reconstructions of Birgittine liturgy and architecture for scientific exploration, scholarly exchange and public engagement.
Global Chant Database
A searchable database of plainchant melodies and texts included in medieval sources and new editions. It serves as a simple tool for searching information on Gregorian chant and other medieval monody including sacred songs.
Johannes Tinctoris: Complete Theoretical Works
A complete new edition of Tinctoris's treatises, along with full English translations and multiple layers of commentary material, covering a wide range of technical, historical and critical issues arising from both the texts themselves and the wider context of Tinctoris’s life and the musical environment of early Renaissance Europe.
The Lost Voices Project: A Digital Domain for Renaissance Music
Explores a little-studied repertory of sixteen sets of French polyphonic songs published in Paris by Nicolas Du Chemin between 1549 and 1568.
Motet Database Catalogue Online
A database catalogue of the motet repertory and its sources, facilitating all aspects of motet research.
Tasso in Music Project
Digital Edition of the Settings of Torquato Tasso's Poetry, c. 1570–1640.
Opening the Geese Book
Completed in 1510 for the parish of St. Lorenz in Nuremberg, this large-format gradual preserves the mass liturgy that was sung by choir boys until the Reformation was introduced in 1525.

Handel Reference Database
Over 4000 items.
Beethovens Werkstatt
Genetic text criticism and digital music edition to examine compositional processes in Beethoven's oeuvre.
Online Chopin Variorum Edition
Digital images of the manuscripts and first editions of select works by the Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin.
Sarti-Edition
Digital edition of two operas by the composer Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802).
CNW Catalogue of Carl Nielsen's Works
First ever thematic-bibliographic registration of all Nielsen's compositions.
The Josquin Research Project
Search, browse, and analyze complete scores of polyphonic music, ca. 1420-ca. 1520.
Gesualdo Online
The project collects the entire production of Carlo Gesualdo da Venosa (1566-1613), one of the major composers of the late Italian Renaissance.
John Cage Unbound: A Living Archive
An archived site from New York Public Library.
Schenker Documents Online
Includes unpublished works, preparatory materials, and personal documents.
Carl Maria von Weber Gesamtausgabe
The edition will comprise around 50 volumes of music including critical reports, 10 volumes of letters, around 8 volumes of diaries, 2 volumes of writings, a catalog raisonné and several volumes of documents.
Digital Mozart Edition
Features a fully digital edition that uses the open, XML-based format of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI)

AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM)
CHARM was established to promote a musicology that better reflects the nature of music as experienced beyond the written text.
Silent Film Sound & Music Archive
The archive includes sheet music for film, cue sheets, instruction manuals for film accompanists, and a bibliography of resources on silent film sound and music.
SONIC: Sound Online Inventory Catalog
The Library of Congress Recorded Sound Collection includes published and unpublished recordings, contained on a variety of physical formats representing the history of sound recording from late nineteenth century cylinders and discs to the latest digital files, with radio broadcasts and spoken word, as well as vocal and instrumental music.
Europeana - Music Collections
Explore recordings, sheet music, instruments and music-related collections from European audio-visual archives, libraries and museums.
British Library Sounds
Presents 50,000 recordings from the Library’s extensive collections of unique sound recordings which come from all over the world and cover the entire range of recorded sound: music, drama and literature, oral history, wildlife and environmental sounds.
Paisajes sonoros históricos (c.1200-c.1800)
This is a website designed to explore historical urban soundscapes in Andalusian cities, enabling users to recreate music of the past in historical locations through the use of online interactive maps with digital resources (documents, videos, sounds, etc.).
The Spirituals Database
Searchable access to recorded track information for concert Negro Spiritual settings performed by solo Classical vocalists. The resource contains a selection from a century of historic and contemporary concert spiritual recordings produced on compact discs, long-playing (33 1/3 rpm) albums, 78 rpm records, 45 rpm discs, audio cassettes and streamed audio files, as well as demonstration recordings from musical score collections.

Broadside Ballads Online
A digital collection of English printed ballad-sheets from between the 16th and 20th centuries, linked to other resources for the study of the English ballad tradition.
EBBA: English Broadside Ballade Archive
9,359 Early Modern Broadside Ballads, free to the public as text, art, and music.
ChoralWiki: Choral Public Domain Library
CPDL currently hosts free scores of at least 36502 choral and vocal works by at least 3624 composers.
Hymn Tune Index
The HTI database contains all hymn tunes printed anywhere in the world with English-language texts up to 1820, and their publication history up to that date.
Fondo de Música Tradicional IMF-CSIC
Digitized materials of more than 22.000 pieces collected in all seventeen Spanish autonomous communities, with other collections of traditional music being incorporated on an ongoing basis.
Musico Napolitano
Biographical index of data concerning the entertainment professionals active in Naples, from the examination of various sources, such as news, accounting documents, notarial deeds, internal documentation of the institutions, correspondence, etc.
The Italian Opera Aria on the London Stage 1705-1801
The project is based on the surviving libretti, both printed and manuscript, for operas in Italian performed in London. It provides a mechanism by which aria texts can be traced through different libretti, as they were moved from one opera to another by impresarios, conductors, and singers.
Kern Scores
A library of virtual musical scores in the Humdrum **kern data format.
Linked Jazz
The project draws on jazz history materials in digital format to expose relationships between musicians and reveal their community network.
Music Migrations in the Early Modern Age
The investigation of music migrations will offer insight into musico-cultural encounters in spatial terms (European East, West and South), and in temporal terms (17th–18th centuries, i. e. Baroque and Classicism).
Prague Concert Life 1850-1881
Fully searchable records (in English) of cultural events incorporating music performance in Prague from 1850 to 1881, covering all types of music except music theatre.
Themefinder
Themefinder provides a web-based interface to the Humdrum thema command, which in turn allows searching of databases containing musical themes or incipits.
The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library
England’s national folk music and dance archive.

Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA)
A multi-disciplinary facility where composers and researchers work together using computer-based technology both as an artistic medium and as a research tool.
A Big Data History of Music
This AHRC-funded collaboration between Royal Holloway and the British Library transformed some of the world’s biggest datasets about sheet music, making them available to researchers.
Artificial Intelligence and Music (AIM)
A community of academic researchers, industry practitioners and government institutions interested in strengthening all fronts of interaction between Music and Artificial Intelligence.
CompMusic
A research project that aims to advance in the automatic description of music by emphasizing cultural specificity, carrying research within the field of music information processing with a domain knowledge approach. The project focuses on five music traditions of the world: Hindustani (North India), Carnatic (South India), Turkish-makam (Turkey), Arab-Andalusian (Maghreb), and Beijing Opera (China).
Computerized Mensural Music Editing (CMME)
A scholarly initiative to offer free online access to new, high-quality early music scores produced by today's leading experts. The major purpose of the enterprise is to produce and maintain an online corpus of electronic editions, in addition to software tools making them accessible to students, scholars, performers, and interested amateurs.
Muse2ps
The muse2ps program is a command-line version of the autoset, mskpage and pspage programs which are usually run within the dmuse editor using the built-in zbex language interpreter. The muse2ps program reads MuseData stage2 data or page file data from standard input and converts them into PostScript data representing graphical musical notation which is sent to standard output.
Musedata
This website is a frontend for muse2ps.

Where to Start

Digital Tools & Encoding Initiatives

Get Involved

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