Music and Digital Humanities

with Christof Weiß, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU)

The Distinguished Lecture Series Music and Digital Humanities at mdw — University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna invites leading international experts in diverse aspects of DH to share their perspectives with our students, faculty, and community. The series is aimed at a broad, non-technical audience. It provides a varied overview of the history and current state of DH as it applies to music, its philosophical underpinnings and societal implications, and is expected to yield insights into relevant methodologies, technologies, infrastructures, and applications working with humanities datasets.

Topics include data management and computational analysis for digital musicology, digital editions, DH and artificial intelligence, machine learning and music information retrieval, as well as pedagogy, science communication, and citizen science. The series is convened by Chanda VanderHart and David M. Weigl, digital musicology researchers at the mdw's Department for Music Acoustics — Wiener Klangstil, and organized in collaboration with the mdw's Department of Musicology and Performance Studies.

Lectures will be presented in English.

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This project is funded by CLARIAH-AT with support from the BMFWF.

Programm

Computational Analysis of Music Audio Recordings: Corpora, Concepts, and Algorithms
Christof Weiß, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU)

Due to their wide availability and the relatively low effort required for data preparation, audio data offers significant opportunities for musical corpus studies. Moreover, they allow for considering improvised, electronically generated, or graphically notated music. Extracting explicit information such as pitches, chords, or (local) keys from audio recordings poses a major challenge. This talk focuses on dataset and methods for extracting such information and presents strategies how to exploit the potential of deep learning while preserving interpretability of the methods. The developed methods build the basis for in-depth analyses of major works such as Wagner's Ring and comprehensive corpus studies of vocal and instrumental music across several centuries of music history.

Christof Weiß received the Ph.D. degree (2017) in media technology from Technische Universität Ilmenau, Germany. He also holds degrees in physics (University of Würzburg) and composition (Würzburg University of Music). Since 2022, he has been aprofessor for Computational Humanities at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU), where he leads a DFG-funded Emmy Noether research group on computational music analysis. Previously, he worked at the International Audio Laboratories Erlangen and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT) and was a visiting researcher at Télécom Paris. His research lies at the intersection of music information retrieval, audio signal processing, and computational musicology, with a focus on harmonic and tonal analysis and corpus-based approaches. He has received several awards, including the Baldwin and Inge Knauf Award (2026) and a Best Paper Award at CHR (2023). He served as a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR, 2022–2023) and has been a member of the Editorial Board of the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) since 2022.

Further infos can be found here.