Forum Blog Post News Item | 19. October 2023

About digitality and visions in musicology

By Dr. Desiree Mayer and Dr. Martha Stellmacher

Digitality in musicological research and how it affects professional and working culture - this is the topic of a discussion initiated by NFDI4Culture in September 2023. Does it really brings along new approaches or are we just reproducing our existing questions, problems, and limitations in the digital realm? And what exactly does the term "digitality" mean - isn't it too vague and holds too much room for interpretation? The aim of NFDI4Culture was to find out about ideas, visions, but also difficulties that researchers from the various disciplines of musicology face in their everyday work.

A total of seven representatives from different music-related research fields - including computer-aided music analysis, ethnomusicology, sociology of music, and historical musicology - have recorded their point of view on these issues in contributions to the blog Musiconn.Kontrovers.

The contributions contain various, sometimes intentionally controversial positions: Complaints are made that musicology in the digital simply does the same as before and that there are too few opportunities to train students in dealing with digitality as well as with tools. But visions of the future also shine forth of a forum that redefines collaboration and roles among stakeholders, or of research guided by community thinking that shares data and results.

We thank all authors for their input and look forward to comments and reactions. Click here to read the contributions (in German).