Like many others working in the DH directory space, we have found that some projects do not lend themselves to easy classification. Although all of our our music digital humanities genre tagging is subject to interrogation, sorting the following entries into buckets was particularly challenging. They may borrow elements of DH or music scholarship genres—i.e., edition, software, visualization—and remix them into a work that defies categorization. A work like the CHARM Mazurka Project includes a discography, a publication list, analytical plots, and the Sonic Visualiser software. Phantom Islands – A Sonic Atlas provides us with a map interface through which to explore artifacts of the age of colonial expansion accompanied by “musical, biophonic and geophonic soundscapes” by composer Andrew Pekler. The entries below are arguably the ones that gesture the most towards a uniquely born-digital music DH. We may acquire recognizable names for these work types in the future, but for now they’re bubbling merrily away in laboratory test tubes, hence our title. Whether they are first-of-their-kind, “genrequeer,” or sui generis, we’ve included these projects in Laboratories.
In no particular order…