The Use of Computers in Musicological Research

I PRESUME to speak on the subject of "Computers in Musicological Research" by virtue of two unassailable qualifications: I am not a computer expert, and I am not a musicologist. These, of course, are my qualifications to be presumptuous, not my qualifications to speak. Rather, I should like to think that one of the reasons why I was invited to speak on this subject corresponds to one of the primary reasons that led me to accept: as a confessed Synthesizer expert, and as a convicted composer, I have for so long been exposed and no doubt shall continue to be exposed to, on the one hand, intellectual Luddites, and on the other hand, nonintellectual Luddites, that I have finally been rewarded with the opportunity to address those whose very presence may be assumed to signify that they do not jealously guard their right and that of their fellow humans to do those tasks which can be far more quickly and accurately accomplished by machines. I cannot but believe that all that need be said to such a group of music historians and theorists to demonstrate not only the feasibility but the desirability of computer utilization is to remind them of the nature of the investigations in which they are customarily engaged, and the extent to which such investigations are or should be dependent upon procedures and techniques which have been and are being applied in other fields; those procedures which are normally termed "sub-statistical": indexing, cataloguing, and searching; and those which are genuinely statistical: the formulation of attributive hypotheses in the interests of characterization and attribution, the testing of hypotheses, the sampling of compositions from a compositional population, the determining of correlations between dimensions of a work, between works, and between collections of works, scaling, sequential testing, etc. Unfortunately, the absence of as yet any startling or even definitive re-