Empirical Musicology Aims, Methods, Prospects [Paperback]

The study of music is always, to some extent, empirical, in that it involves testing ideas and interpretations against some kind of external reality. But in musicology, the kinds of empirical approaches familiar in the social sciences have played a relatively marginal role, being generally restricted to inter-disciplinary areas such as psychology and sociology of music. Rather than advocating a new kind of musicology,Empirical Musicologyprovides a guide to empirical approaches that are ready for incorporation into the contemporary musicologist's toolkit. Its nine chapters cover perspectives from music theory, computational musicology, ethnomusicology, and the psychology and sociology of music, as well as an introduction to musical data analysis and statistics. This book shows that such approaches could play an important role in the further development of the discipline as a whole, not only through the application of statistical and modeling methods to musical scores but also--and perhaps more importantly--in terms of understanding music as a complex social practice.

1. Introduction: What is Empirical Musicology?,Nicholas Cook and Eric Clarke
2. Documenting the Musical Event: Observation, Participation, Representation,Jonathan Stock
3. Musical Practice and Social Structure: A Toolkit,Tia DeNora
4. Music as Social Behavior,Jane Davidson
5. Empirical Methods in the Study of Performance,Eric Clarke
6. Computational and Comparative Musicology,Nicholas Cook
7. Modelling Musical Structure,Anthony People
8. Analyzing Musical Sound,Stephen McAdams, Phillipe Depalle and Eric Clarke
9. Data Collection, Experimental Design, and Statistics in Musical Research,Luke Windsor

Eric Clarke, Professor of Music at the University of Sheffield, has published on the psychology of performance, the study of rhythm, and musical meaning. He was Chailc™