Music and Digital Humanities

Hand in Hand: Adventures in Interdisciplinary Digital Musicology with Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl

The Distinguished Lecture Series Music and Digital Humanities  at mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna invites leading international experts in diverse aspects of DH to share their perspectives with our students, faculty, and community. The series is aimed at a broad, non-technical audience. It provides a varied overview of the history and current state of DH as it applies to music, its philosophical underpinnings and societal implications, and is expected to yield insights into relevant methodologies, technologies, infrastructures, and applications working with humanities datasets.

Topics include data management and computational analysis for digital musicology, digital editions, DH and artificial intelligence, machine learning and music information retrieval, as well as pedagogy, science communication, and citizen science. The series is convened by Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl, digital musicology researchers at the mdw's Department for Music Acoustics — Wiener Klangstil, and organized in collaboration with the mdw's Department of Musicology and Performance Studies.

Lectures will be presented in English.

___

This project is funded by CLARIAH-AT with support from the BMFWF.

Programm

In 1999 David Huron hailed the dawning of a new, data-rich era and proliferation of systematic tooling, a “new empiricism”, ushering in a paradigm shift for musicology, uniting the musical sciences and the humanities. A quarter century later, algorithms and tools for working with music information have proliferated, yet remain largely disregarded by (historical) musicologists. Overcoming the siloing of disciplines is difficult; per Fleck, scientific communities tend to resist ideas and methods that contradict their shared intellectual framework, assumptions, and conventions. Addressing this gap effectively requires an intentional approach to interdisciplinary collaboration where domain experts meet at eye-level. Interdisciplinary design must be structural, not cosmetic, with research questions formulated from varied perspectives. Tool development must incorporate user needs into the design process. Institutional proximity matters – with experts across the divide communicating on a daily, rather than quarterly, basis.

Finally, in true cross-domain collaboration, participants must be willing to become novices again. This requires tolerating uncertainty, asking basic questions, and occasionally appearing uninformed in front of one’s peers.  Without a shared willingness to speak imperfectly across disciplinary lines, to not know, and to (re)learn, interdisciplinary projects risk becoming either dominated by one field or paralyzed by mutual defensiveness. Against this backdrop, we report on digital music research conducted at our institute over several recent research projects, in dialogue with the wider digital musicology community. We lay out the research questions that motivated our projects, introduce tools developed and implemented within them, and demonstrate their application for both research and dissemination, centering musicological data in visible, sharable, citable structures.

Chanda VanderHart is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Applied Music Research at the
University in Krems and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the mdw. Her current work sits at the intersection of musicology, gender studies, and cultural sociology. A certified Data Steward, she publishes extensively on gender, music history, and cultural institutions, often
employing digital methods to challenge androcentric histories.

David M. Weigl is a Senior Scientist at the mdw, specialised in digital music research. His
work focuses on the modelling of information behaviour and on the application of Web technologies and Linked Data models to support digital scholarship. He has led a number of research projects in this area, including Signature Sound Vienna, an interdisciplinary
investigation of the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert series, and Let’s Encode!, establishing a Citizen-Science infrastructure for the encoding and validation of music scores.

Further infos can be found here.