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The Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil (IWK) at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna is offering the position of a
to conduct research at the Department of Music Acoustics – Wiener Klangstil (IWK) at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.
The successful candidate will conduct research situated within the IWK’s “Digital Music Research” area led by Dr. David M. Weigl in collaboration with Prof. Werner Goebl (Head of Department). The successful candidate is expected to contribute to digital musicology research and software development incorporating music encoding, collaborative corpus creation, and large-scale musicological analysis.
The student will be employed in two third-party funded research projects:
The FWF-funded project “Let’s Encode!” (PAT 2277625; 2026–29), conducted between IWK and the mdw’s Dept. of Cultural Management (IKM) provides a primary focus for these activities. This project is working to establish a sustainable, decentralised Citizen Science infrastructure for crowd-based music encoding and validation activities, building on the mei-friend music editing software developed at IWK. The project involves close interdisciplinary collaboration between specialists in music informatics, music encoding, cultural management and cultural institution studies, and features a strong emphasis on the incentivization of music scholars, performers, and enthusiasts to participate in crowd-encoding activities, as well as engaging with these audiences to explore novel use-cases opened up by the availability of music encodings at scale.
The WWTF-funded project “Executable Workflows for Digital Music Research” (DARE25-003) generalises and modularises workflows developed at IWK to adapt and extend digital musicology tools, fostering broader participation and interoperability, with a view toward long-term community engagement and impact.
The successful candidate is expected to undertake doctoral studies at mdw.
Expected starting date: November 2026 (flexible)
Working hours: part-time, 30 hours per week (alongside PhD)
Contract length: 24 months (with possible extension by another 12 months)
Salary: According to the Austrian collective labour agreement, the monthly gross pay for doctoral candidates is € 2,832.10 (14 times), including health care and social benefits.
Tasks: The successful candidate is responsible for conducting digital music research at IWK. In the context of “Let’s Encode!”, the candidate will engage in digital musicology activities employing the project’s citizen-science infrastructure in the creation of a high-quality corpus of music encodings. The creation of this corpus will serve in the validation and iterative improvement of the editing and validation environment developed within the project. At the same time, it will serve as the basis of musicological explorations of this newly-available repertoire.
In the context of “Executable Workflows for Digital Music Research”, the candidate will assist in the modularisation and generalisation of workflow components in existing software developed at IWK and lead the evaluation of the new modules in collaboration with project partners.
The successful candidate is expected to work collaboratively with project teams and interested parties (participant groups) within both project environments. A deep familiarity with our key audiences – music technologists, scholars, performers, and enthusiasts – and a background in musicology are essential for this task.
Employment requirements: Applicants hold a Master’s degree in musicology, informatics, or a closely related field, have completed substantial academic training at Bachelor level in both musicology and informatics (or closely related fields), and demonstrate interdisciplinary familiarity across these domains. Experience with programming languages (e.g., Python, JavaScript), music encoding technologies (e.g., MEI, MusicXML) is essential. Applicants must demonstrate professional competence in English.
Desired qualifications: Experience with Web technologies (e.g., HTML, RESTful APIs), semantic Web technologies (e.g., RDF, JSON-LD), distributed data storage and processing (e.g., using GitHub Actions or Solid PODs), and professional competence in German would each be highly beneficial.
Application deadline: October 28, 2026
Applications must be submitted in electronic form via the mdw application portal https://www.mdw.ac.at/bewerbungsportal. Applications should include 1) a cover letter describing your qualifications and interest in the research topic, 2) a CV, 3) a short proposal for PhD research (2–3 pages), and 4) contact details for two referees.
The mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna is committed to the equal treatment of all qualified applicants regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, world-view, age, or disability. The University is particularly interested in increasing the percentage of women working in the artistic, scientific and general university personnel ranks. It therefore expressly encourages qualified women to apply. It should be specifically mentioned, however, that applicants who are invited to interview will not receive remuneration from the university for incurred travel and hotel expenses (interviews via teleconference can be accommodated).
Rector: Ulrike Sych
The text represents the legally binding job posting from the University Bulletin (Section 20 Para 6 Item 10 Universities Act).
Hinweis! Diese Stelle steht nur auf englisch zur Verfügung.
Vollzeit
Softwareentwicklung
€ 2.832