On the Virtuous and the Vexatious in an Age of Big Data
David Huron · Music Perception An Interdisciplinary Journal · 2013
T HE USE OF COMPUTERS IN MUSIC RESEARCHhas a history that in some sense precedes theinvention of the computer. Back in the 1940s, Bronson (1949, 1959) pioneered the use an IBM card-sorter (a predecessor of the general purpose com-puter) to examine patterns in traditional British folk ballads. In the 1960s, the Princeton Josquin Project attempted to use computational methods to establish the network of copied manuscript sources (Hall, 1975). In the mid 1970s, Bauer-Mengelberg spearheaded the DARMS project—an enterprising venture to develop a comprehensive encoding language for representing and processing notated music (Erickson, 1976). No ethnomusicologist will be unaware of Lomax’s ambi-tious Cantometrics (Lomax, 1968). Although these pio-neering efforts might warrant the moniker ‘‘visionary,’’ the accomplishments of these pioneers were modest