Earlier in the semester, with corpus studies we saw how computational music theory intersects with the study of music history. All computational methods rely on quantitative (and usually statistical) methods and require the development of new algorithms or applying existing algorithms to solve them. We are returning to topic 5 from a slightly different angle to examine the algorithms of music study and how they relate to computational music studies.
In this video, I describe work that was only lightly computational but required the development of new statistical methods, borrowed from animal population biology, to estimate the number of lost pieces in the fourteenth century.
Video 32a: Tipping the Iceberg
Read the full article: Cuthbert, “Tipping the Iceberg: Missing Italian Polyphony from the Age of Schism,” Musica Disciplina Vol. LIV (2009), pp. 39–75.
