Crunching ballads (Bibliolore)

The RILM blog, Bibliolore, published a recent post about the early history of computational musicology:

In the 1940s Bertrand Harris Bronson became one of the first scholars to use computers for musicological work.

For one of his projects he encoded melodic characteristics of hundreds of tunes collected for the traditional ballad Barbara Allen on punch cards, so a computer could ferret out similarities. His project resulted in four groups of tunes, members of which came from both sides of the Atlantic with varying frequency.

Read more at their site.  The RILM blog is amazing in any case.