humdrumR: A user-friendly software package for computational music analysis

FAIN: HAA-280706-21

Georgia Tech Research Corporation (Atlanta, GA 30318-6395)
Nathaniel Condit-Schultz (Project Director: January 2021 to present)
Claire Arthur (Co Project Director: June 2021 to present)

A set of software tools and instructional materials that will facilitate the computational analysis of musical scores. 

Musicology research is a humanistic endeavor well suited to computational methods. Yet, despite the work of a small niche of scholars, most humanistic music scholarship is conducted via traditional, non-digital techniques. This research vacuum has been largely filled by those pursuing digital music research from a largely engineering perspective - the field of Music Information Retrieval. Unfortunately, this research often lacks crucial humanistic knowledge and perspective. We seek NEH funding to produce a set of software tools and pedagogical materials for computational musicology analysis which are appealing and accessible to musicologists and music theorists. Our project is based off a well-established computational musicology framework, humdrum. Our project modernizes and expands the humdrum ecosystem (consisting of a toolkit and unique data format), introducing a new software package called humdrumR (hum-drummer), and will include online computational musicology tutorials.