Digitizing a 19th-Century Music Theory Debate for Computational Analysis

We report the progress of the ongoing project “Digitizing the Dualism Debate: a case study in the computational analysis of historical music theory sources”. First, we give a brief introduction to the dualism debate, a central discussion in 19th-century German music theory. We then describe the transcription pipeline with which we process the digitized sources in order to arrive at a corpus of computationally feasible representations, and discuss a number of encountered challenges, e.g. the assignment of structural types and idiosyncratic symbols. Employing text similarity measures and topic modeling, we present some preliminary analyses. Future steps include text annotation, music encoding, and the presentation of the corpus with an online interface.