Digitizing musical scores : challenges and opportunities for libraries

Musical scores and manuscripts are essential resources for music theory research. Although many libraries are such documents from their collections, these online resources are dispersed and the functionalities for exploiting their content remain limited. In this paper, we present a qualitative study based on interviews with librarians on the challenges libraries of all types face when they wish to digitize musical scores. In the light of a literature review on the role libraries can play in supporting digital humanities research, we conclude by briefly discussing the opportunities new technologies for optical music recognition and computer-aided music analysis could create for libraries

Conference Reports

The COVID-19 pandemic caused many conference cancellations, while others moved to the virtual environment.  Below are reports from five virtual conferences: New England Chapter of the MLA by Marci CohenMountain-Plains Chapter of the MLA: Two Perspectives by Christine Edwards and Ellwood P. ColahanTeaching Music Online in Higher Education by Kevin MadillAssociation for Recorded Sound Collections by Rebecca ShawMusic Encoding Conference by Emily Hopkins, Yaolong Ju, Juliette Regimbal and Martha Thomae

“What does the data tell us?: Representation, Canon, and Music Encoding”

In this keynote, Kijas explores issues embedded in musicological traditions of canonicity and discusses the need for recovery of underrepresented composers in order to build a more inclusive digital canon

Understanding Optical Music Recognition

For over 50 years, researchers have been trying to teach computers to read music notation, referred to as Optical Music Recognition (OMR). However, this field is still difficult to access for new researchers, especially those without a significant musical background: Few introductory materials are available, and, furthermore, the field has struggled with defining itself and building a shared terminology. In this work, we address these shortcomings by (1) providing a robust definition of OMR and its relationship to related fields, (2) analyzing how OMR inverts the music encoding process to recover the musical notation and the musical semantics from documents, and (3) proposing a taxonomy of OMR, with most notably a novel taxonomy of applications. Additionally, we discuss how deep learning affects modern OMR research, as opposed to the traditional pipeline. Based on this work, the reader should be able to attain a basic understanding of OMR: its objectives, its inherent structure, its relationship to other fields, the state of the art, and the research opportunities it affords

Digitalización de documentación musical. Una guía de implantación

Se presenta en este trabajo una aproximación a la implantación de una metodología para la digitalización de partituras. Después de la explicación del concepto y clasificación de documentación musical, se tratan las principales fases del proyecto. En primer lugar, la planificación y gestión del proyecto, en la que se discuten aspectos como la selección de materiales y demás objetivos, los perfiles profesionales necesarios, el presupuesto y la documentación del proyecto. Posteriormente, en la sección dedicada a la captura, se realiza un análisis de los principales parámetros de calidad en digitalización, además de dos tecnologías específicas como son el OMR y las imágenes multiespectrales. El siguiente aspecto incluido en el trabajo es la creación y asignación de metadatos, con especial atención a los estándares dedicados a la descripción de documentación musical. Finalmente, se discuten distintas opciones de difusión en la web.Máster Universitario en archivos, gestión documental y continuidad digital. Curso 2016/201

Exploring information retrieval, semantic technologies and workflows for music scholarship: the Transforming Musicology project

Transforming Musicology is a three-year project undertaking musicological research exploring state-of-the-art computational methods in the areas of early modern vocal and instrumental music (mostly for lute), Wagner’s use of leitmotifs, and music as represented in the social media. An essential component of the work involves devising a semantic infrastructure which allows research data, results and methods to be published in a form that enables others to incorporate the research into their own discourse. This includes ways of capturing the processes of musicology in the form of ‘workflows’; in principle, these allow the processes to be repeated systematically using improved data, or on newly discovered sources as they emerge. A large part of the effort of Transforming Musicology (as with any digital research) is concerned with data preparation, which in the early music case described here means dealing with the outputs of optical music recognition software, which inevitably contain errors. This report describes in outline the process of correction and some of the web-based software which has been designed to make this as easy as possible for the musicologist

proposta de uma ontologia para a música

UID/EAT/00472/2013O crescimento da Internet e o consequente aumento do volume de informação sobre música agravou o problema relacionado com a descrição, consulta e partilha deste tipo de informação, manifestado pela enorme heterogeneidade estrutural e semântica ao nível da representação da informação musical em catálogos de bibliotecas, arquivos e museus, em bases de dados de universidades e centros de I&D, em bases de dados de rádios, editoras ou de serviços de streaming digital, como por exemplo o Youtube e o Spotify. As soluções do passado que preconizavam a criação de um catálogo único centralizador, ainda presente no projecto RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), é uma meta já sem sentido. Uma nova abordagem pode passar pela criação de uma ontologia para a música, multilingue, que possa ser aplicada a diferentes catálogos e bases de dados. Para isso importa considerar os atuais vocabulários controlados e ontologias para a música, por forma a poder reutilizar esta informação numa ontologia única que permita promover a interoperabilidade entre serviços distribuídos, possibilitando finalmente uma pesquisa e recuperação de informação musical de caráter avançado e integral.publishersversionpublishe

A heterogeneidade na representação da informação musical: proposta de uma ontologia para a música

O crescimento da Internet e o consequente aumento do volume de informação sobre música agravou o problema relacionado com a descrição, consulta e partilha deste tipo de informação, manifestado pela enorme heterogeneidade estrutural e semântica ao nível da representação da informação musical em catálogos de bibliotecas, arquivos e museus, em bases de dados de universidades e centros de I&D, em bases de dados de rádios, editoras ou de serviços de streaming digital, como por exemplo o Youtube e o Spotify.As soluções do passado que preconizavam a criação de um catálogo único centralizador, ainda presente no projecto RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), é uma meta já sem sentido. Uma nova abordagem pode passar pela criação de uma ontologia para a música, multilingue, que possa ser aplicada a diferentes catálogos e bases de dados. Para isso importa considerar os atuais vocabulários controlados e ontologias para a música, por forma a poder reutilizar esta informação numa ontologia única que permita promover a interoperabilidade entre serviços distribuídos, possibilitando finalmente uma pesquisa e recuperação de informação musical de caráter avançado e integral

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings 2021, 19–22 July, 2021 University of Alicante (Spain): Onsite & Online

Este documento incluye los artículos y pósters presentados en el Music Encoding Conference 2021 realizado en Alicante entre el 19 y el 22 de julio de 2022.Funded by project Multiscore, MCIN/AEI/10.13039/50110001103

Digital Approaches to Troubadour Song

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Jacobs School of Music, 2020The troubadours were poet-composers who flourished in Occitania (today southern France) and surrounding areas during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Their lyric poems survive in chansonniers (songbooks) which usually contain only the texts. A fraction of the melodies that accompanied these poems were written down; fewer than 350 melodies survive for a lyric corpus of over 2,600 songs which appear over 13,000 times in all extant sources. This dissertation is part of a larger project whose aim is twofold: to create an openaccess, electronic, searchable archive of these melodies and to apply computational methods of analysis to identify the musical characteristics of the melodies, find patterns and relationships, and track trends in style both over time and within the works of individual authors. In this study, I first illustrate the methodology I followed to assess and encode the corpus of troubadour melodies and give an overview of the types of tools used to analyze the encoded melodies. In the subsequent chapters, I present five case studies which investigate musical features of the repertory through computational and statistical approaches, where I confirm, revise, or expand on existing knowledge of the repertory. The first case study identifies the extent and features of Guiraut Riquier’s melismatic writing by applying analytical techniques typically used to analyze textual corpora. The second case study applies a different technique borrowed from computational linguistics, Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), to track the similarity of melodies with versions extant in multiple sources and to compare the phrases of melodies in one manuscript which have notation for more than one stanza. The three case studies in Chapter III adopt other analytical approaches to investigate and compare the pitch and interval content of the melodies. These studies help identify patterns in pitch organization in the entire repertory, point out stylistic trends of specific troubadours, and compare selected musical features by source. Overall, this study demonstrates the possibilities of computational approaches to contribute to existing scholarship on this repertory. Furthermore, the digital archive created for this project aims to empower additional research on the music of the troubadours, including the study of corpus-wide characteristics, the analysis of stylistic traits in specific authors or sources, and changes in style over the course of the tradition