[Historyoftheory] (no subject)

[Eric Bianchi]

Dear Folks,

I'm writing to let you know about an upcoming event that might interest our
community in NYC:  on Tuesday, May 1 at 2018 at 5:00pm, Prof. Michael
Cuthbert (MIT) will give a talk at the Heyman Center for the Humanities on
"Distant Listening/Digital Musicology: music21 and Compositional Similarity
in the Late Middle Ages," followed by a round-table discussion. The talk is
open to the public. Abstract and flyer below; further information can also
be found here:
http://scienceandsociety.columbia.edu/cssevent/distance_listening/



*Distant Listening/Digital Musicology:music21 and Compositional Similarity
in the late Middle Ages*

Digital humanities approaches, including Franco Moretti’s influential
concept of “distant reading,” have transformed areas of textual scholarship
in recent decades, but such ideas have had less of an impact on
musicology.  There were two reasons for this lack of uptake in music:
first, a general dearth of tools for examining hundreds or thousands of
musical scores.  Second, there were few examples of such approaches’
success in answering difficult questions in music history, necessary to
reward the investment of time and energy in the skills in programming to
access these techniques.  In this talk, Cuthbert, argues that both hurdles
have finally been overcome by demonstrating approaches to “distant
listening” to musical scores with the music21 toolkit, developed at M.I.T.,
and its application to finding previously unknown webs of influence,
citation, quotation, perhaps even plagiarism, among a repertory of 3,000
musical scores drawn from European sources from 1300–1430, including the
identification of over 30 fragmentary musical works previously considered
too small or illegible for study.
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