Beyond the score: Music visualization and digital humanities

CON T E N T S NEX T PAGE > NEX T ART I C L E > < PRE V I OUS PAGE Margaret Lam investigates challenges related to the transmission, preservation and organization of music knowledge. She works independently as a researcher, writer and designer as well as a collaborat r on various p ojects. You can learn more about her work at www.margism.com. M usic – beyond the scores, recordings and signal analysis that occupies information scientists and music librarians – has the amazing ability to bring human history to life. The ethos of a time and place is inevitably reflected by the humanities, and music is no exception. We know this effect through our own personal experiences: the way couples have their song, the way music takes you back to a time in a different place, the soundtrack of car radios, movies and television shows that accompany us through various life stages. For many music scholars the socio-cultural aspect of music is an important part of their research. However, current conceptualization of music research within digital humanities does not fully address the socio-cultural element in music research. Efforts within the digital humanities are focused primarily on music as either information or artifact. While the elements of music such as pitch and rhythm are common to all music researchers to various degrees, it is not fully representative of the diverse approaches that music research can take [1]. Conceptualization of what constitutes music within digital humanities is necessarily narrow as we experiment with different applications of technologies to support music research.Yet, as I will suggest in this short piece, a broader conceptualization of music is necessary for digital humanities research in the domain of music to have real impact on music scholarship.