Computational Musicology - oxymoron or perfect fit?

Abstract

Music has often occupied an awkward position in academic scholarship: its physical foundations in the vibrations of sound and mathematical properties of its structure tightly link its study to rational thought and the scientific method, whereas its historical and artistic nature situates it in philosophic and aesthetic debates within the humanities. Moreover, both its cultural diversity as well as its appreciation and consumption place it firmly in the context of the social sciences. In my talk I will present examples of a renewed scientific and scholarly interest to transcend this apparent disciplinary barrier using computational methods to study music and argue that this development instantiates larger a epistemological changes regarding how we study cultural phenomena at large.

Fabian C. Moss

Assistant Professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory

Fabian C. Moss is an assistant professor for Digital Music Philology and Music Theory at Julius-Maximilians University Würzburg (JMU), Germany.