In this position paper, we frame the field of Visual Musicology by providing an overview of well-established musicological sub-domains and their corresponding analytic and visualization tasks. To foster collaborative, interdisciplinary research, we discuss relevant data and domain characteristics. We give a description of the problem space, as well as the design space of musicology and discuss how existing problem-design mappings or solutions from other fields can be transferred to musicology.

We argue that, through methodology transfer, established methods can be exploited to solve current musicological problems and show exemplary mappings from analytics fields related to text, geospatial, time-series, and other high-dimensional data to musicology. Finally, we point out open challenges, discuss research gaps, and highlight future research opportunities.

We carefully prepared our Visual Musicology Graph enabling readers to learn further details about every branch and leaf in the space. Obviously, this graph can be easily extended at any position considering the current progress of research and industry.

This paper gave us the framing to define our musicology-related projects in the respetive space. Allowing others to identify potential areas of open research challenges and possible collaboration with domain experts.

@article{miller:2019:framing,
  author    = {Matthias Miller and
               Hanna Sch{\"{a}}fer and
               Matthias Kraus and
               Marc Leman and
               Daniel A. Keim and
               Mennatallah El{-}Assady},
  title     = {{Framing Visual Musicology through Methodology Transfer}},
  journal   = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH) at IEEE VIS 2019},
  year      = {2019},
  doi       = {10.1109/VISUAL.2019.8933656}  
}