ABSTRACT
Symbolic data mining in musicology is concerned with extracting musical information from symbolic representations of music: that is, music that is represented by sequences of symbols over time. Representing music symbolically is certainly not a new practice; the majority of Western music exists primarily in a symbolic notation system evolved over more than a thousand years, and there are many examples of symbolic musical notation in other cultures. However, in the majority of cases the symbols used in this kind of study come from common practice musical notation, in the Western European tradition, within the last half millennium. Usually, these are the familiar notes and rests, but sometimes other representations such as chord symbols, neumes, tablature, or various kinds of performance markings are used.
