Finding What You Need, and Knowing What You Can Find: Digital Tools for Palaeographers in Musicology and Beyond

This chapter examines three projects that provide musicologists with a range of resources for managing and exploring their materials: DIAMM (Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music), CMME (Computerized Mensural Music Editing) and the software Gamera. Since 1998, DIAMM has been enhancing research of scholars worldwide by providing them with the best possible quality of digital images. In some cases these images are now the only access that scholars are permitted, since the original documents are lost or considered too fragile for further handling. For many sources, however, simply creating a very high-resolution image is not enough: sources are often damaged by age, misuse (usually Medieval ‘vandalism’), or poor conservation. To deal with damaged materials the project has developed methods of digital restoration using mainstream commercial software, which has revealed lost data in a wide variety of sources. The project also uses light sources ranging from ultraviolet to infrared in order to obtain better readings of erasures or material lost by heat or water damage. The ethics of digital restoration are discussed, as well as the concerns of the document holders. CMME and a database of musical sources and editions, provides scholars with a tool for making fluid editions and diplomatic transcriptions: without the need for a single fixed visual form on a printed page, a computerized edition system can utilize one editor’s transcription to create any number of visual forms and variant versions. Gamera, a toolkit for building document image recognition systems created by Ichiro Fujinaga is a broad recognition engine that grew out of music recognition, which can be adapted and developed to perform a number of tasks on both music and non-musical materials. Its application to several projects is discussed

Topografija i klasifikacija digitalne muzikologije

How does one make sense of the rapidly growing array of resources for musicologists online? In part, the answer depends on what specific interests are topical in the local environment. User needs vary widely. This contribution examines some organization issues in large repositories that available without cost in Europe and North America. Obstacles to finding sites with relevant material are many and generally parallel those familiar from using physical libraries.Područje digitalne muzikologije proširilo se vrlo brzo, ali i ponešto nepravilno. Povremeno se doima poput izobličenoga stabla ili karte za tumačenje – s ubrzanim rastom malenoga područja koje odjednom postaje vrlo krupno (optičko skeniranje izvora odgovarajuć je primjer tog fenomena) nakon čega uskoro dolazi do ubrzanog rasta u nesrodnom području. Mnogi digitalni projekti suočeni su s velikim brojem tehničkih problema koje je potrebno rješiti prije nego što se išta može uspješno predstaviti javnosti. Pregledom nekih od najpoznatijih i najkorištenijih digitalnih projekata (ViFaMusik, e-codices, Gallica, Gaspari Online, rana glazba, DIAMM i RISM) vidimo da ovise o opsežnoj suradnji te da i imaju povijest široke suradnje koja je u podlozi njihovih digitalnih napora. Prava inovacija koja više ovisi o digitalnim mogućnostima koje nisu bile dostupne prije deset godina uključuje Josquin Research Project, Beethoven Werkstatt i web-stranicu Machaut Society sa svojim Mirador preglednikom detalja u rukopisima. Kao online alat, RISM Manuscript Inventory uzoran je primjer križanja starih i novih metoda istraživanja. On objedinjuje informacije sakupljene tijekom desetljeća od strane knjižničara u preko šezdeset zemalja. Trenutno nudi više od milijun zapisa, te visoko kvalitetne bibliografske podatke zajedno s nedavno razvijenim alatima za pretraživanje glazbe. Stotine ljudi i znatna financijska sredstva učinili su njihovo trenutno djelovanje mogućim. Stavljanje RISM-a na mrežu (od 2011.) pretvorilo ga je iz ezoteričnog akronima u resurs koji naširoko konzultiraju izvođači i znanstvenici. Ne možemo znati što digitalnu muzikologiju čeka u budućnosti. Ipak, samo površan pregled prethodno nedostupnih primarnih izvora ponuđenih na web-stranicama brojnih nacionalnih knjižnica obećava da će poljuljati mnoga ustaljena znanja o glazbenoj prošlosti. Generacije i generacije udžbenika i monografija oslanjale su se na najbolje dostupne sekundarne izvore kada nije bilo pristupa primarnim izvorima. Za stotine tema više nije potrebno oslanjati se na sekundarne izvore. Primarnim izvorima od ranih napjeva do djela iz dvadesetog stoljeća lako je pristupiti preko mreže. Pristup tim izvorima duboko će promijeniti znanstveno istraživanje uklanjanjem furnira bezbrojnih slojeva akademske proze i otkrivanjem onoga što je glazba prošlosti doista bila. Pitanja interpretacije neće nestati, ali poboljšani pristup može im olakšati procjenu. (Priča o repertoarima izvan europskih umjetničkih glazbenih tradicija različita je samo u pojedinostima: izvori su vjerojatno dostupni kao audio ili video datoteke i često nema opširne ostavštine ranih spisa koju bi se propitivalo.) Svi izvori navedeni u ovom članku dostupni su bez naknade ili drugih zapreka

The Semantic Web MIDI Tape: An Interface for Interlinking MIDI and Context Metadata

The Linked Data paradigm has been used to publish a large number of musical datasets and ontologies on the Semantic Web, such as MusicBrainz, AcousticBrainz, and the Music Ontology. Recently, the MIDI Linked Data Cloud has been added to these datasets, representing more than 300,000 pieces in MIDI format as Linked Data, opening up the possibility for linking fine-grained symbolic music representations to existing music metadata databases. Despite the dataset making MIDI resources available in Web data standard formats such as RDF and SPARQL, the important issue of finding meaningful links between these MIDI resources and relevant contextual metadata in other datasets remains. A fundamental barrier for the provision and generation of such links is the difficulty that users have at adding new MIDI performance data and metadata to the platform. In this paper, we propose the Semantic Web MIDI Tape, a set of tools and associated interface for interacting with the MIDI Linked Data Cloud by enabling users to record, enrich, and retrieve MIDI performance data and related metadata in native Web data standards. The goal of such interactions is to find meaningful links between published MIDI resources and their relevant contextual metadata. We evaluate the Semantic Web MIDI Tape in various use cases involving user-contributed content, MIDI similarity querying, and entity recognition methods, and discuss their potential for finding links between MIDI resources and metadata

Povratak izvoru, virtualno: RISM kao alat u digitalnom okruženju

The online catalogue of the Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) contains over 1,088,000 records for music manuscripts, imprints, libretti, and treatises. Since the release in 2010, RISM has launched several initiatives to bring musicologists closer to the primary source materials they are researching. The online catalogue attempts to expand the database beyond simply recording the locations of musical sources. With the availability of the RISM data as linked open data, RISM is able to collaborate with other projects in the digital humanities and provide data as a basis for research projects. The release of Muscat, RISM’s open- source specialized software for cataloguing musical sources, has made it easier for RISM project participants to catalogue musical sources. This article will describe how the RISM online catalogue brings musicologists closer to primary source materials and how musicologists can work with RISM using Muscat to facilitate and disseminate their own source-based research.Kad je 2010. Međunarodni repertoar glazbenih izvora (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales – RISM) objavio svoj besplatan, online dostupan katalog, podaci o više od 700.000 glazbenih izvora postali su dostupni istraživačima diljem svijeta bez naknade. Danas katalog sadrži više od 1,067.000 zapisa o glazbenim rukopisima, tiskovinama, libretima i traktatima te njegova popularnost raste iz mjeseca u mjesec. Od objavljivanja online kataloga, RISM je pokrenuo nekoliko inicijativa kako bi se muzikologe približilo primarnim materijalnim izvorima koje istražuju, što je olakšano preko digitalizacijskih projekata koje provode knjižnice i istraživačke ustanove. Online katalog pokušava proširiti bazu podataka izvan okvira suštog zabilježavanja lokaliteta na kojima se glazbeni izvori nalaze, iako to zasigurno i dalje ostaje jedan od primarnih ciljeva. RISM nudi poveznice do digitalizirane glazbe izravno preko institucija koje ih posjeduju (tamo gdje je to dostupno), uključuje uzorke rukopisa skladatelja i prepisivača te prikazuje slike vodenih žigova. Godine 2014. cjelokupni korpus podataka RISM-a objavljen je kao povezani otvoreni podaci (linked open data). Zahvaljujući tome, RISM je u mogućnosti ostvariti suradnju s drugim projektima iz područja digitalne humanistike i osigurati podatke kao osnovu za istraživačke projekte. U isto vrijeme, vanjski projekti teže povratno poslati svoje podatke – često s ispravcima i poboljšanjima – kako bi obogatili RISM-ov katalog. Objavljivanje Muscat-a, RISM-ovog specijaliziranog open-source programa za katalogiziranje glazbenih izvora, RISM-ovim je suradnicima olakšalo katalogiziranje glazbenih izvora. Ovaj novi program također daje priliku muzikolozima da Muscat koriste kao alat u svojim vlastitim projektima dokumentiranja. Cilj je ovoga članka opisati na koji način RISM-ov online katalog muzikologe približava primarnim glazbenim izvorima te, također, kako muzikolozi mogu surađivati sa RISM-om, a da bi olakšali i promicali svoje vlastito istraživanje glazbenih izvora

RISM and Inventorying Early Music Manuscripts in Slovenia

Since its inception, the project Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) has played a major role in the creation of an inventory of preserved early music heritage in Slovenia. This article presents the background and the current state of cooperation between Slovenian musicology and the RISM project, focusing on the latest additions to the online catalogue from the music collection of the Church of St Daniel in Celje

RISM and Inventorying Early Music Manuscripts in Slovenia

Since its inception, the project Répertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) has played a major role in the creation of an inventory of preserved early music heritage in Slovenia. This article presents the background and the current state of cooperation between Slovenian musicology and the RISM project, focusing on the latest additions to the online catalogue from the music collection of the Church of St Daniel in Celje

Methodological considerations concerning manual annotation of musical audio in function of algorithm development

In research on musical audio-mining, annotated music databases are needed which allow the development of computational tools that extract from the musical audiostream the kind of high-level content that users can deal with in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) contexts. The notion of musical content, and therefore the notion of annotation, is ill-defined, however, both in the syntactic and semantic sense. As a consequence, annotation has been approached from a variety of perspectives (but mainly linguistic-symbolic oriented), and a general methodology is lacking. This paper is a step towards the definition of a general framework for manual annotation of musical audio in function of a computational approach to musical audio-mining that is based on algorithms that learn from annotated data. 1

Supporting musicological investigations with information retrieval tools: an iterative approach to data collection

Digital musicology research often proceeds by extending and enriching its evidence base as it progresses, rather than starting with a complete corpus of data and metadata, as a consequence of an emergent research need. In this paper, we consider a research workflow which assumes an incremental approach to data gathering and annotation. We describe tooling which implements parts of this workflow, developed to support the study of nineteenth-century music arrangements, and evaluate the applicability of our approach through interviews with musicologists and music editors who have used the tools. We conclude by considering extensions of this approach and the wider implications for digital musicology and music information retrieval

Applying Automatic Translation for Optical Music Recognition’s Encoding Step

Optical music recognition is a research field whose efforts have been mainly focused, due to the difficulties involved in its processes, on document and image recognition. However, there is a final step after the recognition phase that has not been properly addressed or discussed, and which is relevant to obtaining a standard digital score from the recognition process: the step of encoding data into a standard file format. In this paper, we address this task by proposing and evaluating the feasibility of using machine translation techniques, using statistical approaches and neural systems, to automatically convert the results of graphical encoding recognition into a standard semantic format, which can be exported as a digital score. We also discuss the implications, challenges and details to be taken into account when applying machine translation techniques to music languages, which are very different from natural human languages. This needs to be addressed prior to performing experiments and has not been reported in previous works. We also describe and detail experimental results, and conclude that applying machine translation techniques is a suitable solution for this task, as they have proven to obtain robust results.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry HISPAMUS project TIN2017-86576-R, partially funded by the EU, and by the Generalitat Valenciana through project GV/2020/030

Exploring early vocal music and its lute arrangements: Using F-TEMPO as a musicological tool

In its earliest state, F-TEMPO (Full-Text searching of Early Music Prints Online) enabled searching in the musical content of about 30,000 page-images of early printed music from the British Library's Early Music Online collection (GB-Lbl). The images were processed using the Optical Music Recognition (OMR) program, Aruspix, whose output is saved in the MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) format. To enable fast searches of the MEI, we adopted an indexing strategy that is both scalable and substantially robust to the inevitable errors in the process. In this paper we show how searches using these indexes may be used as a first step in two useful musicological tasks without exhaustively processing the full encodings. The F-TEMPO resource has subsequently been augmented to about 500,000 images including a large number from the Bavarian State Library in Munich (D-Mbs), and other libraries (D-Bsb, PL-Wn and F-Pn). Most recently, a new and more robust system architecture is in development, together with a new interface conforming better to modern web standards. The simple, yet robust, indexing method we use can be applied to scores encoded in any format from which strings of pitches each corresponding to a voice or instrument in the score can be derived. In addition to page-images, in its current form F-TEMPO now includes a collection of over 10,000 scores encoded in MusicXML, largely of early music, from the online Choral Public Domain Library (CPDL). To show the potential for F-TEMPO as a tool for musicologists to explore the full-text content of the collections, we look at two simple tasks: (a) finding pages which contain similar music to a given query page; and (b), given a query representing an approximation to the highest-sounding voice from a lute arrangement of a popular vocal item from the 16th century, finding a likely vocal model within the F-TEMPO index