One of the overarching goals of musicology is to explore and understand music as a cultural and sonic phenomenon, or more broadly, to comprehend the relationship between music and humanity. It serves a function similar to many other disciplines in the humanities—not only systematizing knowledge but also shaping the way we think about music and its role in culture. Musicology aims to study music, its structure, history, functions, and significance. In this sense, it is a cognitive science with the goal of understanding music, much like physics seeks to understand the laws governing the material world. Music never exists in a vacuum—it is part of human experience. Thus, it strives to comprehend the role of music in culture and human life. The tasks of musicology include, among others:
- Protecting and transmitting cultural heritage (research on early music, music editing, recording archiving).
- Explaining how music affects people (music psychology, issues of identity, social rituals).
- Facilitating the interpretation of music (through theoretical, historical, and performance analysis).
Musicology deepens human understanding of music and its value—both aesthetically and culturally—and understanding music helps build cultural identity and interpersonal communication. Therefore, musicology is not only the study of music but also a tool for understanding and shaping society.
Digital Musicology and the Perception and Performance of Music Digital musicology not only employs innovative methods for studying scores but also delves into the very process of performance and music reception. With appropriate tools, digital analysis of recordings allows researchers to examine differences between historical and contemporary performances. Acoustic simulations of historical spaces help reconstruct the sound of music in its original context. Algorithms can recognize performance styles and historical practices, such as differences in articulation, tempo, and ornamentation.
Digital Musicology as a New Way of Understanding Music Classical musicology focused on the individual analysis of works, whereas digital musicology offers a global and systemic perspective. It can support research processes concerning various methodologies, such as:
- How musical styles have evolved over hundreds of years
- The statistical characteristics of harmony, rhythm, and form across different eras
- How music spreads within cultural networks (e.g., analysis of musical quotations, compositional influences).
Through this, digital musicology transforms the way we think about music, shifting from the analysis of individual works to the study of entire musical systems.
What Added Value Does Digital Musicology Bring to Contemporary Humanities? If musicology strives for a better understanding of music and its role in culture, digital musicology does not alter this goal but adds new means to achieve it. Digital musicology aims for universal accessibility and the democratization of knowledge about music. It enables open access to musical sources, which were previously limited to elite institutions. It allows new ways of listening to and analyzing music, opening the field for interdisciplinary research (music + AI, music + Big Data, music + perception). It creates new opportunities in editing, analysis, and archiving, making musical heritage more accessible and comprehensible.
The Establishment of the Centre for Digital Musicology at the University of Wrocław
The Centre for Digital Musicology (CDM) was founded from the grassroots initiative of the international research group “LuteTabLab”, initiated by Dr. Grzegorz Joachimiak. This led to the establishment of the CDM in April 2024 at the Institute of Musicology of the University of Wrocław. Its creation stems from the need to develop innovative research and teaching methods in historical musicology, systematic musicology, music anthropology, and the Soundscape Research Studio co-created by the Institutes of Cultural Studies and Musicology at the University of Wrocław. CDM is a space where traditional musicological issues meet the latest technologies—from analyses and expert evaluations to publications based on digital research tools. At CDM, we currently focus on digital music source studies, developing tools that enable analysis and expert evaluation of musical sources: manuscripts, prints, and phonographic records. Our activities include automated transcription of musical notations using machine learning (AI), paleographic analyses, and text transcriptions that allow for precise dating and attribution of both sources and transcriptions of musical documents. Staff, PhD candidates, and students of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Wrocław have participated and continue to participate in various digital musicology projects, such as the Bibliotheca Rudolphina project (in cooperation with Cantores Minores Wratislavienses and the University Library in Wrocław), the Virtual Museum of Baroque Frescoes in Lower Silesia (in collaboration with the Institute of Art History at the University of Wrocław and the Natural History Museum in Jelenia Góra-Cieplice Śląskie Zdrój), the Lute Book (in cooperation with Polona Digital Library of the National Library of Poland), and the Heritage of Polish Music in Open Access (National Institute of Fryderyk Chopin). We also collaborate with experts from other fields, developing interdisciplinary research projects that expand both academic (research and teaching) applications of digital musicology, which is also linked to our teaching activities in this area. Our interests also include comparative studies in musical philology and stylometry—using language models allows us to achieve results previously unattainable in musicology.
Goals of the Centre for Digital Musicology at the University of Wrocław Digital musicology, as a contemporary extension of classical musicology, redefines how we study, interpret, and experience music. If we accept that the goal of musicology is a deeper understanding of music and its role in culture, digital musicology opens new possibilities for achieving this goal. The CDM at the University of Wrocław aims to support this idea. This is done, for example, through new tools for exploring music that allow research in previously impossible ways:
- Analysis of large datasets (Big Data) helps identify stylistic patterns, genre evolution, or harmonic relationships within vast musical collections.
- Machine learning and artificial intelligence assist in manuscript transcription, composer style recognition, and even the prediction of musical structures.
- Musical network analysis helps study relationships between composers, works, and performance traditions.
- Automatic sound analysis allows the examination of the acoustic features of historical recordings or the reconstruction of past performance practices.
In this sense, digital musicology expands the epistemology of musicology, creating new forms of music analysis and research that were not available through traditional methods. The CDM will support activities related to the archiving and dissemination of musical heritage:
- Providing researchers access to manuscripts, historical editions, and music catalogs on an unprecedented scale;
- OCR and OMR technologies accelerate the editing and transcription processes of musical sources;
- Digital critical editions allow for interactive approaches to scores—e.g., using Humdrum, Verovio, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).
The main goal of the CDM is to preserve and promote Europe’s musical heritage, which, thanks to modern technologies, can be better secured, more precisely analyzed, and easily accessible to a broad audience. It also includes conducting educational activities in digital musicology and, more broadly, digital humanities.
We are open to collaboration and invite students, doctoral candidates, academics, cultural institutions, and business representatives to engage in joint initiatives.
