ABSTRACT
The journal Computers in Music Research, seems to have ceased publication in 1999. Certainly the pages of the journal Music Analysis do not provide evidence of the widespread use of computers in analysis. An analyst approaching a piece of music brings with her or him a richness of experience of this and other pieces, which inevitably influences judgements. Early efforts in music research with computers spent considerable amounts of time on designing a representation, and then on encoding music in that representation. Even greater difference is found in the objectives which underlie the field of music information retrieval (MIR), which has increased markedly since 2000, and is now probably the most productive field of music research with computers. The gulf seems wider than Erickson thought: it is not one of understanding only but one of objectives also. Though the gulf is perhaps inevitable, we should not allow it to impede research.
