Read/Write Digital Libraries for Musicology

The Web and other digital technologies have democratised music creation, reception, and analysis, putting music in the hands, ears, and minds of billions of users. Music digital libraries typically focus on an essential subset of this deluge—commercial and academic publications, and historical materials—but neglect to incorporate contributions by scholars, performers, and enthusiasts, such as annotations or performed interpretations of these artifacts, despite their potential utility for many types of users. In this paper we consider means by which digital libraries for musicology may incorporate such contributions into their collections, adhering to principles of FAIR data management and respecting contributor rights as outlined in the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation. We present an overview of centralised and decentralised approaches to this problem, and propose hybrid solutions in which contributions reside in a) user-controlled personal online datastores, b) decentralised file storage, and c) are published and aggregated into digital library collections. We outline the implementation of these ideas using Solid, a Web decentralisation project building on W3C standard technologies to facilitate publication and control over Linked Data. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by implementing prototypes supporting two types of contribution: Web Annotations describing or analysing musical elements in score encodings and music recordings; and, music performances and associated metadata supporting performance analyses across many renditions of a given piece. Finally, we situate these ideas within a wider conception of enriched, decentralised, and interconnected online music repositories

Rehearsal encodings with a social life

MEI-encoded scores are versatile music information resources representing musical meaning within a finely addressable XML structure. The Verovio MEI engraver reflects the hierarchy and identifiers of these encodings into its generated SVG output, supporting presentation of digital scores as richly interactive Web applications. Typical MEI workflows initially involve scholarly or editorial activities to generate an encoding, followed by its subsequent publication and use. Further iterations may derive new encodings from precedents; but the suitability of MEI to interactive applications also offers more dynamic alternatives, in which the encoding provides a framework connecting data that is generated and consumed simultaneously in real-time. Exemplars include compositions which self-modify according to external contextual parameters, such as the current weather at time of performance, or which are assembled by user-imposed external semantics, such as a performer’s explicit choices and implicit performative success at playing musical triggers within a composition. When captured, these external semantic signals (interlinked with the MEI structure) themselves encode the evolution of a dynamic score during a particular performance. They have value beyond the immediate performance context; when archived, they allow audiences to revisit and compare different performances

Scholarly Music Editions as Graph: Semantic Modelling of the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe

This paper presents a first draft of the ongoing research at the Anton Webern Gesamt- ausgabe (Basel, CH) to apply RDF-based semantic models for the purpose of a scholarly digital music edition. A brief overview of different historical positions to approach music from a graph-theoretical perspective is followed by a list of music- related and other RDF vocabularies that may support this goal, such as MusicOWL, DoReMus, CIDOC CRMinf, or the NIE-INE ontologies. Using the example of some of Webern’s sketches for two drafted Goethe settings (M306 & M307), a preliminary graph-based model for philological knowledge and processes is envisioned, which incorporates existing ontologies from the context of cultural heritage and music. Finally, possible use-cases, and the consequences of such an approach to scholarly music editions, are discussed

Scholarly Music Editions as Graph: Semantic Modelling of the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe

This paper presents a first draft of the ongoing research at the Anton Webern Gesamtausgabe (Basel, CH) to apply RDF-based semantic models for the purpose of a scholarly digital music edition. A brief overview of different historical positions to approach music from a graph-theoretical perspective is followed by a list of music-related and other RDF vocabularies that may support this goal, such as MusicOWL, DoReMus, CIDOC CRMinf, or the NIE-INE ontologies. Using the example of some of Webern's sketches for two drafted Goethe settings (M306 & M307), a preliminary graph-based model for philological knowledge and processes is envisioned, which incorporates existing ontologies from the context of cultural heritage and music. Finally, possible use-cases, and the consequences of such an approach to scholarly music editions, are discussed

Music - Media - History

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge)

Alleviating the Last Mile of Encoding: The mei-friend Package for the Atom Text Editor

MEC 2021 BEST PAPER AWARD. Though MEI is widely used in music informatics and digital musicology research, the relative lack of authoring software and the specialised nature of its community have limited the availability of high-quality MEI encodings. Translating to MEI from other encoding formats, or generating MEI via optical music recognition processes, is thus a typical component of many MEI-project workflows. However, automated translations rarely achieve results of sufficient quality, a problem well-known in the community and documented in the literature. Final correction and validation by hand is therefore a common requirement. In this paper, we present meifriend, an extension to the Atom text editor, which aims to relieve the degree of manual labour required in this process. The tool facilitates most common MEI editing tasks including the insertion and manipulation of MEI elements, makes the encoded score visible and interactively accessible to the user, and provides quality-of-life conveniences including keyboard shortcuts for editing functions as well as intelligent navigation of the MEI hierarchy. We detail the tool’s implementation, describe its functionalities, and evaluate its responsiveness during the editing process, even when editing very large MEI files

Music - Media - History: Re-Thinking Musicology in an Age of Digital Media

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge)

Music - Media - History

Music and sound shape the emotional content of audio-visual media and carry different meanings. This volume considers audio-visual material as a primary source for historiography. By analyzing how the same sounds are used in different media contexts at different times, the contributors intend to challenge the linear perspective of (music) history based on canonic authority. The book discusses AV-Documents (analysis in context), methodological questions (implications for research, education, and popularization of knowledge), archives of cultural memory (from the perspective of Cultural Studies) as well as digitalization and its consequences (organization of knowledge)

A Stage of Emancipation

As the prominence of the recent #WakingTheFeminists movement illustrates, the Irish theatre world is highly conscious of the ways in which theatre can foster social emancipation. This volume of essays uncovers a wide range of marginalised histories by reflecting on the emancipatory role that the Dublin Gate Theatre (est. 1928) has played in Irish culture and society, both historically and in more recent times. The Gate’s founders, Hilton Edwards and Michéal mac Liammóir, promoted the work of many female playwrights and created an explicitly cosmopolitan stage on which repressive ideas about gender, sexuality, class and language were questioned. During Selina Cartmell’s current tenure as director, cultural diversity and social emancipation have also featured prominently on the Gate’s agenda, with various productions exploring issues of ethnicity in contemporary Ireland. The Gate thus offers a unique model for studying the ways in which cosmopolitan theatres, as cultural institutions, give expression to and engage with the complexities of identity and diversity in changing, globalised societies

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings

UIDB/00693/2020 UIDP/00693/2020publishersversionpublishe