A Matter of Perspective: Taking a Distant View of Music History

I’m delighted that my article “A Matter of Perspective: Taking a Distant View of Music History” has just been published in the National Early Music Association Newsletter. The article sets out the case for using statistical techniques to study music history, with particular reference to early music, and specifically the Boalch Mould Online dataset of early keyboard instruments. You can read the article here.

Update (21 January 2025): The paper also got a mention on the BMO Blog.

Desert Island Discs Revisited

My article on Desert Island Discs from April 2020 has been, by some margin, the most popular page on this site, in terms of number of visitors. Last year, I was approached by some researchers from the Alan Turing Institute about sharing the data with them so that they could do their own analysis. I was delighted to see this Turing Data Story appear on their website in March this year – they have updated my dataset, added further information from Wikipedia and Spotify, and looked at some different questions. Excellent stuff!

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