Studies in Western Music History: Quantitative and Computational Approaches to Music History
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this graduate-level seminar on computational musicology, taught through readings, discussion, and hands-on lab sessions. Students work with digital tools and datasets to study large repertories of music, examining trends and stylistic norms across corpora rather than individual works. Class sessions alternate between lecture-discussion and practical labs on data analysis methods used in the field. The course assumes prior background in music theory or history, and programming experience is described as extremely helpful for the technical work involved. Coursework builds toward an independent research project in quantitative or computational musicology, which students present to the class at the end of the term. Materials include the syllabus, readings list, and assignment structure as published on MIT OpenCourseWare, free to access under MIT's open license, with no certificate offered.