A Big Data History of Music

This collaboration between Royal Holloway and the British Library will provide a paradigm shift in how music history is researched. It will bring together the world’s biggest datasets about published sheet music and music manuscripts for statistical analysis, manipulation and visualisation for the first time. The project team will draw upon the combined dataset (containing records of more than 5 million compositions or parts of musical compositions) to challenge current thinking about music history and the transmission of music across boundaries. Finally, the data will be made available as an open dataset for researchers to undertake big data research across multiple disciplines.