Studying Early Music with Computers: Tools, Formats, and Strategies is the American Musicological Society’s two-week residential summer institute made possible by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This institute will provide a unique opportunity for scholars and educators to learn more about the machine-assisted study of early music.

Focused on the practical applications of digital technologies, the institute will consist primarily of practitioner workshops and seminars on specific tools, formats, and machine-assisted investigative strategies. Through both expert talks and interactive workshops, participants will be equipped with the knowledge needed to advance their own research and teaching, including detailed explorations of the technical, infrastructural, and funding requirements necessary for conceiving, developing, deploying, and maintaining digital humanities projects and programs for the study of early music (c. 1000–1750 CE).

The proposed institute will be composed of a mix of expert talks and hands-on “tool-based” workshops. Institute Co-directors Julie Cumming and Richard Freedman will kick off the first week by leading this conversation as part of their introduction to the institute. The Institute will then feature talks by a long list of pioneers in this field. Jennifer Bain and Debra Lacoste will discuss the challenges of studying plainchant and how their Cantus Database and Cantus Index can be used to facilitate this work. Richard Freedman will provide an overview of the challenges of studying sixteenth-century counterpoint and introduce participants to CRIM (Citations: The Renaissance Imitation Mass). Karen Desmond and Martha Thomae will introduce the challenges of studying medieval mensural notation and lead a workshop in using Measuring Polyphony. Emiliano Ricciardi and Craig Sapp will discuss their Tasso in Music project and how it, and tools like it, can help illuminate the study of sixteenth-century poetry and music. Cory McKay and Julie Cumming will end week one by discussing how to create digital datasets or corpora of musical scores and how the software application jSymbolic can facilitate feature extraction, and how to use that data to classify composers, genres, or chronology.

Week two will begin with a full day devoted to exploring the practical challenges of planning, funding, developing, deploying, and maintaining digital tools for the analysis of early music. On that day, Ichiro Fujinaga, a leader in the field of music technology, will speak on his experience with very large projects. He will describe how to formulate a digital project concept, put together a team, and apply for support. Craig Sapp, who has provided technical and conceptual support for multiple digital projects (including the Tasso in Music Project, the Josquin Research Project, and Measuring Polyphony) will discuss the kind of technical infrastructure that is required to support a large digital musicology project. And Jennifer Bain, leader of the DACT project, will discuss issues of data security, an essential concern for any digital project. Thereafter, during the rest of week two, participants will break into two groups or streams to work intensively on applying what they have learned to their specific research or pedagogical interests. The first group, whose work will be facilitated by Richard Freedman and Reba Wissner, will focus on incorporating digital musicology into the undergraduate classroom. Participants will conceive, plan, and begin creating specific resources, lesson plans, or other materials for use in the classroom. The second group, to be led by Megan Kaes Long and Chris White, will focus on conceiving, mapping, researching, and planning potential digital musicology projects, resources, or tools to support research. The goal will be for participants to leave the institute having made substantial progress toward using new digital tools and outlining the steps needed to support their own research.

We will provide opportunities for informal sharing of pedagogical resources, both among the institute’s participants and in the wider AMS community. We plan to hold a follow-up session where participants give lightning talks about the institute’s outcomes at the Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society in November 2026; and we will encourage participants to present their work as part of the AMS Annual Meeting in November 2027. As part of the institute, we will make participants aware of other avenues where they might share their findings, including AMS online events.