Computational musicology

Computational musicology is an interdisciplinary research area between musicology and computer science. Computational musicology includes any disciplines that use computers in order to study music. It includes sub-disciplines such as mathematical music theory, computer music, systematic musicology, music information retrieval, computational musicology, digital musicology, sound and music computing, and music informatics. As this area of research is defined by the tools that it uses and its subject matter, research in computational musicology intersects with both the humanities and the sciences. The use of computers in order to study and analyze music generally began in the 1960s, although musicians have been using computers to assist them in the composition of music beginning in the 1950s. Today, computational musicology encompasses a wide range of research topics dealing with the multiple ways music can be represented. This history of computational musicology generally began in the middle of the 20th century. Generally, the field is considered to be an extension of a much longer history of intellectual inquiry in music that overlaps with science, mathematics, technology, and archiving. Early approaches to computational musicology began in the early 1960s and were being fully developed by 1966. At this point in time data entry was done primarily with paper tape or punch cards and was computationally limited. Due to the high cost of this research, in order to be funded projects often tended to ask global questions and look for global solutions. One of the earliest symbolic representation schemes was the Digital Alternate Representations of Music or DARMS. The project was supported by Columbia University and the Ford Foundation between 1964 and 1976. The project was one of the initial large scale projects to develop an encoding scheme that incorporated completeness, objectivity, and encoder-directedness.