We are excited to announce that the CCML has been awarded a $350,000 Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The grant, entitled humdrum(R): computational tools for musicological and ethnomusicological research will fund continued work on our humdrumR software. The NEH previously funded this project with a smaller Level II DHAG grant in 2021, we are very excited and honored that the NEH has seen the value in continuing to support our project.
Besides supporting the continued improvement of humdrumR—aiming for the release of version 1.0 by the end of 2026—this grant will support a variety of projects to make the humdrum empirical musicology echosystem more supportive of diverse musical cultures from all around the world.
This includes developing new and better ways of encoding non-Western musical systems and the creation and curation of corpora of these musics.
Of course, many aspects of musical practice can’t be faithfully “encoded” in symbols at all, so we will also be developing new tools for synchronizing (symbolic) humdrum data with raw audio and video files.
We will also have amazing collaborators at other institutions helping us with this project: Dan Shanahan at Northwestern University, Johanna Devaney at Brooklyn College, Aaron Carter-Ényì at Morehouse College, and Craig Sapp at Stanford University.