Attitudes of Music Scholars Towards Digital Musicology

Music research appears to lag behind other fields in adopting methods coming from the digital humanities (DH). Researchers have hypothesized that this might be due to the gulf that exists between music scholars who use computational approaches and those who do not, which makes it more difficult for the former group to publish their research and gain recognition for their research from their peers. If we are to invest efforts and resources in the development of tools for music analysis, it seems crucial to understand what could impede their adoption. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of an ongoing qualitative study based on five in-depth interviews with music scholars from Canadian universities. We focus more specifically on 1) how music scholars perceive and value digital musicology, and 2) how they think doing digital musicology could affect the career progression of a scholar. We found that the participants who did not do DH research expressed skepticism towards the validity and relevance of DH research in music, valued traditional approaches, and, to some extent, feared that DH methods could displace traditional methods. Participants from both sides of the gulf noted that doing DH research in music could sometimes constitute an advantage in the career progression of music scholars (e.g., for getting funding), but that it could also be detrimental in other circumstances (e.g., for getting published in renowned journals).