Course 13: Digital Musicology

Stefan Münnich · University of Basel

Lecturer

Stefan Münnich is a research associate in Musicology at the University of Basel and affiliated with its Digital Humanities Lab, where his work connects music philology, musical notation, and semantic digital musicology. He earned his doctorate at the University of Basel in 2020 with a dissertation on musical notation and its codes, and has been a research associate for the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe since 2015, implementing semantic graph and Semantic Web technologies for digital music editing. His research interests include the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), optical music recognition, and the challenges of encoding historically and culturally diverse notational systems. He previously contributed to the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy edition project at the University of Leipzig.

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Lecture Overview

Overview

Munnich presents digital musicology as an interdisciplinary field that uses computational methods to explore musical traditions, documents, and practices. The lecture stresses both the breadth of the field and the special challenges posed by musical data and notation.

Main Points

Digital musicology sits at the intersection of musicology, digital humanities, and multiple technical disciplines.
The field includes work on music encoding, optical music recognition, digital editions, performance analysis, cognition, preservation, and music information retrieval.
Munnich emphasizes sustainability concerns such as stable data, long-term storage, citation, and future accessibility.
A major distinction in the lecture is between audio processing and symbolic representations such as notation and encoded scores.
Musical data is particularly complex because notation systems vary historically and culturally, and because encoded music often creates the readable representation rather than merely annotating it.

Examples Mentioned

Music Encoding Initiative markup
Optical music recognition
Audio versus symbolic data workflows
Historical and non-European notation systems

Source transcript: transcripts/Course 13_Münnich_DigitalMusicology.txt

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