Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2019
Interest in the aid of computers within musicology has so far mainly been concentrated on (a) documentation and (b) analysis of music as notated. It still remains to take the important step into that vast field of material, problems, and research that could be labeled music as performed, both as regards the physiological, the acoustical, and the perceptive side. Here it seems possible to predict the arrival of a quite new type of research in the near future. One main problem that remains to be solved is the transformation of registered data from analogous to digital form to get numerical values directly printed out or otherwise stored for computer treatment.
A preliminary version of this paper was presented as a companion to Elizabeth Tolbert's paper, “The Ethnopsychology of Music, Trance and Lament” at the ICTM conference in Schladming, Austria, July 1989. References to Tolbert without year pertain to Elizabeth Tolbert's field data or to analyses as described in her essay in this volume.