Please join us for a Macgeorge Fellow lecture by Professor Richard Freedman (John C. Whitehead '43 Professor of Humanities at Haverford College). This talk inaugurates a series of five workshops, culminating in a digital humanities study day.

Musical Inquiry in a Digital Age

What does the study of music look like in an era of ubiquitous data? What sorts of systems have humans devised to learn, transmit, and preserve music? How have we collected and categorized music, in all its richness? We can consider these questions from two key axes: “Data about Music,” and “Music as Data.” Considering “Data About Music” invites us to think about the various musical museums we routinely traverse as scholars and as listeners. These sound archives (from the Golden Record to the Global Jukebox) are thick with ethical and conceptual problems that shape how we think about genres, works, and performances. No less important is the second, “Music as Data,” which asks us to consider the digital mediation of music through various forms of transcription—from the graphical scores on your music stand to the encoded ones on your laptop.

What would a turn toward these domains of inquiry likely mean for our lives as scholars? In recent decades the figure of the solitary humanist—burrowing away in their library carrel, in search of unique insights—has already become, if not an endangered species, then at least a more wary one, as digital methods (from Python notebooks to LLMs) facilitate newly possible kinds of readings that could never have been undertaken by a single scholar, even over an entire career. Digital skeptics worry that the machine eye (and ear) will soon replace the human one. But we need to remember that algorithms seem uncanny precisely because they play back our all-too-human ways of thought and expression. Those of us pursuing musical inquiry in this digital age need to inform ourselves about how such machines work (and how they fail). This moment demands human hypothesis, and interpretation. Our roles are changing, and it will be up to us whether we play our instruments—or they play us.

Find out more about and register for the workshops.

Find out more about and register for the study day.

Prof Richard Freedman is an internationally recognised expert on Renaissance music and a leading music specialist working in the digital humanities. He has served in leadership roles for major scholarly societies: as Digital and Multimedia Scholarship Editor for The Journal of the American Musicological Society, as Chair of the Technology Committee for the American Musicological Society, as Chair of the Digital and Electronic Media Committee (and member of the Board of Directors) for the Renaissance Society of America, and as member of the Board of Directors of Repertoire International de Litterature Musicale (the leading bibliographical authority for writings on music). He is visiting from Haverford College, near Philadelphia, where he is Professor of Music and John C. Whitehead '43 Professor of Humanities. Prof Freedman is currently visiting the University of Melbourne as a Macgeorge Fellow with the generous financial support of the Macgeorge Bequest.

Image: Drew Echberg

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