Towards Feature-based Versioning for Musicological Research.

This paper discusses the management of revisions and variants of musical works for the context of musicological research. Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are a fundamental tool in music notation and analysis, as they enable the notation of music and also support music analysis when investigating particular structural properties of melody, harmony, rhythm, or form. However, the fields of music philology and music analysis still lack a systematic approach for uniformly managing revisions and variants of musical compositions. This research-in-progress paper proposes the use of feature-based versioning to streamline the management of revisions and variants in music artifacts. We introduce an illustrative example and present research challenges regarding variability and feature-based versioning for musicological research. We present a preliminary approach which involves mapping features to specific parts of musical works and musical analyses, thereby facilitating the composition of new variants based on selected features, a prerequisite for enhanced research in music philology and music analysis.