Global Histories of Music Theory and the Digital Humanities

This presentation examines the intersection of the digital humanities and global histories of music theory, focusing on the promises and challenges of future work in this area. Central to such efforts will be the compilation of a large corpus of high-quality sources. This corpus ought to conform with the FAIR principles of the Open Science movement: the data it contains should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Due to the global nature of this material, compiling such a corpus will require drawing on a range of cutting-edge tools and approaches from the digital humanities. The presentation considers five particular challenges for future work in this area: (1) including right-to-left and non-alphabetic scripts in a coherent database, (2) making non-Western musical notation machine readable, (3) integrating machine-readable musical notation and text in individual documents, (4) incorporating non-verbal sources of music theorizing, and (5) implementing natural language processing of understudied languages.

Jun 13, 2025