Should I talk to my supervisor about including a new field in my PhD? I am a part-time PhD student coming towards the end of my first year – I have another five years left. My PhD is in Music and I do like my topic a lot. However, in the last 18 months I have also become very interested in an area that is not that related to music – computing and open source. I started looking at it as something extra to learn before my PhD started and am now finding it difficult to put down. As well as this, I would like to integrate some aspects of what I have learned into my PhD. I just don't really know what and how. 

Is this something that I should bring up with my PhD supervisor or should I just "put up or shut up"? She may think it's a bit weird to mention it since she will probably feel that it doesn't really relate, however, computing (and its related ethics) are fundamental to the ways in which we undertake academic research these days. We've even had a few classes on software use. I feel that I could probably link the two in some way but little has come up yet which is obvious, though it may well present itself in the future. From past experience I tend to function at my academic best when integrating different challenging interests into my learning and I would love to integrate my learning of computing into my music PhD. I feel I have learned – and applied – a lot and I want to continue learning alongside my music learning and to combine the two in my topic. 

Question: should I raise this with my supervisor, float some ideas past her about this or should I just ignore it? If I do the latter the question may well come back to haunt me further down the line. I don't think I "can" (nor do I want to) give this up, well, not without forcing myself to since it fascinates me. Do others have experience of wanting to mix in new ideas/subjects into their PhDs and how did you go about it?

For clarification - the PhD in Music is ethnomusicological, i.e. the PhD is to do with the study of music in culture and as culture rather than composition or performance.
First, this makes perfect sense. What you are describing is a project in the digital humanities, and there are others in music using computational methods to analyze music and its social context. The place I would suggest starting is to look at the Music Encoding Initiative, which has developed an xml mark-up language for music. The community there can lead you to many other possibilities for integrating music and computation at various levels of computational complexity. The focus remains on the music as the object of study but applies new research methods to it.