3rd day at Wrocław Digital Musicology School!
The third day of the Wrocław Digital Musicology School focused on lute music and digital approaches to the study of historical tablatures.
The day began with a lecture by the head of the Digital Musicology Lab and organiser of the Wrocław Digital Musicology School, Dr Grzegorz Joachimiak, entitled Editing Before the Digital Turn: Case of Lute Music. His presentation explored the challenges of transcribing lute music and preparing editions of lute repertoire before the development of modern digital tools.
Next, Prof. Tim Crawford introduced the possibilities offered by Music Information Retrieval (MIR), demonstrating how even seemingly chaotic and “messy data” can become highly valuable for musicological research. His lecture showed how digital methods enable researchers to uncover new relationships and patterns within musical repertories.
Another highlight of the day was the presentation of the long-term project ECOLM – Electronic Corpus of Lute Music, delivered by David Lewis and Prof. Tim Crawford. The speakers discussed the process of building a digital corpus of lute music, international collaboration between researchers, and the challenges involved in creating tools that support the study of historical lute tablatures.
The afternoon was devoted to practical workshops, during which participants continued working in groups and developing their skills in music encoding using the MEI standard and the .kern format within the Humdrum environment.
It was a day filled with inspiring discussions on how modern technologies can support research into early music — including the complex and fascinating world of lute sources.
Photos below: Grzegorz Pawlik/ Wrocław University Library
Photos below: fot. Paweł Piotrowski/UWr
