Computers have altered so many aspects of musician’s lives, from digital performance, to electronic composition, to how we acquire and share new music, but only recently have they had the potential to transform how we study and analyze music. Michael Scott Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) introduce the new world of Digital Musicology by showing the techniques and tools that allow scholars to “listen faster”: to examine and analyze large repertories of pieces in the time that a human musicologist could only look at and hear a single work. Through computational analysis, clustering techniques, visualization tools, and data-mining of musical works, the landscape of our understanding of music is being shaken and new ground created for the wired music scholar.

Hör’ ich das Liedchen klingen (Robert Schumann)

Dear colleagues:
I am pleased to invite you to the next talk in the Digital Musicology Study Group at Harvard. Please forward this announcement to anyone who might be interested. Thank you!
SASHA: Saxophone Audio Search and Heuristic Analysis
Wednesday, March 9, 5-7pm
Davison Room, Music Department
Harvard University
open to everyone

Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to invite you to the third talk in the Digital Musicology Study Group at Harvard. Please feel free to send this invitation to our colleagues in the Boston area who might be interested. Thank you!
Inventoriana: Annotation and Sharing of Marked-Up Manuscripts and Digital Images (Drew Massey)
Wednesday, December 8, 5-7pm
Davison Room, Music Department
Harvard University

In February 2010 I had the great pleasure to introduce Kent Nagano and Jürgen Partenheimer to a large crowd at the German Conference at Harvard 2010. The two spoke about the relation of artist and state, a multi-faceted topic that proved to be a fitting closing for a conference on diverse matters such as renewable energy, peaceful revolutions and health care reform to name just a few. For those of you who had to miss the event, here is the conference report which includes a thoughtful essay by Jürgen Partenheimer and a synopsis of Kent Nagano’s remarks.