The availability of large symbolic musical databases has provided unprecedented opportunities for music-related research. Such databases greatly facilitate studies in musical stylistics, taste, musical similarity, performance analysis, and even forensic musicology. While these databases offer important opportunities, they also raise difficult methodological challenges.
Available materials exhibit widely differing quality, so estimating error rates is essential.
The variety of data formats means that missing or incompatible information is commonplace. The opportunities and problems afforded by musical databases are discussed and illustrated via several contrasting applications, including the use of such data to generate geographical maps of musical cultures. David Huron is Professor in the School of Music and the Center for Cognitive Science at the Ohio State University. Although trained as a performer, Huron is best known for his research in music perception and cognition. His research emphasizes music and human emotions, and the perception of harmony, voice-leading, and melody.