Between art and science
Nicholas John Cook · British Academy eBooks · 2015
Musicologists have traditionally treated music as a form of sounded writing. Informed by interdisciplinary performance studies, this article explores what musicology might look like if it was built on the idea of music as performance, and how the study of performance can contribute to an understanding of the role of music in culture. In addition to traditional humanities approaches and the employment of close listening, the sheer number of recorded performances creates scope for the use of quantitative approaches. Setting these into the broader context of digital humanities, and putting forward the idea of ‘augmented listening’, I show how technology can serve to advance the understanding of music as cultural phenomenon and human experience.