Written by Eliza Simikian
The Natalie L. Haslam College of Music is proud to announce that Professor Dale Disney, teaching assistant professor of musicology and director of online programs, has been accepted into the 2026 American Musicological Society (AMS) Summer Institute. The two-week residential program, “Studying Early Music with Computers: Tools, Formats, and Strategies,” will be held at New York University and is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It focuses on how digital tools can support research in early music.
A specialist in late medieval music, Disney plans to use the institute to explore how approaches such as data visualization, symbolic music encoding, and digital mapping can offer new ways of working with historical manuscripts. These methods are part of a broader shift in musicology toward integrating computational tools with traditional archival research, particularly for repertories from the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods.
At UT, Disney’s work in online program development intersects with these interests. Her role involves course design and collaboration with the Office of Digital Learning, creating opportunities to bring new research tools into the classroom.
“Early music is often less accessible to students because of its notation systems, its location in archival manuscripts, and the specialized knowledge required to interpret it,” Disney said. “We will be learning jSymbolic, which allows for statistical analysis of musical features across large collections of scores or individual works.”
Tools like jSymbolic have been used to identify recurring modal patterns and stylistic traits in early repertories. For example, researchers can analyze how certain melodic or structural features appear across multiple Mass settings, helping to trace compositional habits that are difficult to detect through close reading alone.
Disney is particularly interested in how computational analysis might clarify the use of cantus firmus techniques in polyphonic works. Essentially acting as a musical blueprint, a cantus firmus is a pre-existing melody that serves as the foundation for a new, multi-layered composition. In many late medieval and Renaissance compositions, a preexisting melody is embedded within a dense musical texture, sometimes obscured across different voices. Systematic analysis of these lines may help reveal patterns or references that are not immediately apparent through traditional study.
Following the institute, Disney plans to incorporate these methods into the college’s online curriculum. Expanding access to digital tools could allow students to engage more directly with large musical datasets and explore questions that extend beyond individual scores.
The institute may also inform future collaborations with the University of Tennessee’s Digital Learning initiatives, contributing to ongoing efforts to integrate computational approaches into humanities teaching. In this way, the project reflects a broader trend in musicology: using technology not to replace historical study, but to extend the kinds of questions scholars can ask of the past.