Computational musicology can be generally divided into the three main branches relating to the three ways music can represented by a computer: sheet music data, symbolic data, and audio data. Sheet music data refers to the human-readable, graphical representation of music via symbols. Examples of this branch of research would include digitizing scores ranging from 15th Century neumenal notation to contemporary Western music notation. Like sheet music data, symbolic data refers to musical notation in a digital format, but symbolic data is not human readable and is encoded in order to be parsed by a computer. Examples of this type of encoding include piano roll, kern, and MIDI representations. Lastly, audio data refers to recording of the representations of the acoustic wave or sound that results from changes in the oscillations of air pressure. Examples of this type of encoding include MP3 or WAV files.
