Digital methods are increasingly applied to store, structure and analyse vast amounts of musical data. In this context, visualization plays a crucial role, as it assists musicologists and non‐expert users in data analysis and in gaining new knowledge. This survey focuses on this unique link between musicology and visualization. We classify 129 related works according to the visualized data types, and we analyse which visualization techniques were applied for certain research inquiries and to fulfill specific tasks. Next to scientific references, we take commercial music software and public websites into account, that contribute novel concepts of visualizing musicological data. We encounter different aspects of uncertainty as major problems when dealing with musicological data and show how occurring inconsistencies are processed and visually communicated. Drawing from our overview in the field, we identify open challenges for research on the interface of musicology and visualization to be tackled in the future.

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Making large sets of digitized cultural heritage data accessible is a key task for digitization projects. While the amount of data available through print media is vast in humanities, common issues arise as information available for the digitization process is typically fragmented. One reason is the physical distribution of data through print media that has to be collected and merged. Especially, merging causes issues due to differences in terminology, hampering automatic processing. Hence, digitizing musicological data raises a broad range of challenges. In this paper, we present the current state of the ongoing musiXplora project, including a multi-faceted database and a visual exploration system for persons, places, objects, terms, media, events, and institutions of musicological interest. A particular focus of the project is using visualizations to overcome traditional problems of handling both, vast amounts and anomalies of information induced by the historicity of data. We present several use cases that highlight the capabilities of the system to support musicologists in their daily workflows.

Digitization projects make cultural heritage data sustainably available. However, while digital libraries may capture various aspects, relations across different sources often remain unobserved. In our project, musicologists aimed to relate musical instruments with historical performances of musical pieces, both contained in different sources. We defined a similarity measure taking instrumentation, temporal as well as geospatial metadata into account, with which we were able to hypothesize potential relations. We propose a novel timeline design that offers a specific semantic zoom metaphor enabling the collaborating musicologists to observe and evaluate the results of our similarity analysis. The value of our system for research in musicology is documented in three case studies.

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