Enhancing Music Notation Addressability

The Enhancing Music Notation Addressability project seeks a Level II DH Startup Grant for developing software to address and extract music notation expressed in the Music Encoding Initiative format. Because addressing music notation segments is central to musicological discourse, we seek to answer such questions as (1) how can one virtually 'circle' music notation? and (2) how can a machine interpret this 'circling' to retrieve music notation? We intend to evaluate our approach by transforming into nanopublications the analytical music annotations already produced by students and scholars as part of the Du Chemin: Lost Voices project, which is reconstructing songs from 16th c. France. Nanopublication is providing the scientific community with a way of outlining attribution and quality of even small contributions to facilitate citation and promote massive collaborative scholarship. We seek to extend its benefits to humanities scholarship

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

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

MuSO: Aggregation and Peer Review in Music

This Level I project will fund a two-day workshop at Texas A&M University for 15 software engineers, music librarians, music encoding specialists, and music scholars from the U.S., Canada and abroad that will lay the foundation to launch MuSO (Music Scholarship Online). Using the period-specific virtual research environments, or research nodes, of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) as templates, this workshop will establish methods for aggregating and evaluating digital projects in the fields of music analysis, culture, history and literature. The workshop will address the metadata needs for media such as musical scores and audio recordings, and it will establish a standard and process for peer reviewing the projects that contribute to and participate in MuSO. The funded workshop will therefore produce a list of changes to the ARC metadata guidelines as well as a method for evaluating digital projects in music

Implementing the Enhancing Music Addressability API for MusicXML

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Implementing the “Enhancing Music Addressability” API for MusicXML

The ability to “address” areas of a musical score is useful in music scholarship such as analysis and/or historical research.In this project, we implement software that enables us to “select” regions of MusicXML files, in accordance with the Enhancing Music Addressability (EMA) specification

Music Encoding Conference Proceedings

UIDB/00693/2020 UIDP/00693/2020publishersversionpublishe

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

A model for annotating musical versions and arrangements across multiple documents and media

We present a model for the annotation of musical works, where the annotations are created with respect to a conceptual abstraction of the music instead of directly to concrete encodings. This supports musicologists in constructing arguments about musical elements that occur in multiple digital library sources (or other web resources), that recur across a work, or that appear in different forms in different arrangements. It provides a way of discussing musical content without tying that discourse to the location, notation or medium of the content, allowing evidence from multiple libraries and in different formats to be brought together to support musicological assertions. This model is implemented in Linked Data and illustrated in a prototype application in which musicologists annotate vocal arrangements of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony from multiple sources

Narratives and exploration in a musicology app: Supporting scholarly argument with the Lohengrin TimeMachine

We present the Lohengrin TimeMachine web application, consisting of video and textual musicological essays supported by an interactive digital companion. The digital companion allows a user to browse and compare all the occurrences of a motive in the opera Lohengrin, viewing them by text, vocal score and orchestration, with detailed views, segment labelling, audio excerpts and textual commentaries supporting the exploration. The video and essay modes show live links into the companion as the viewer or reader progresses through the narrative. This application is built on Linked Data technology and demonstrates the viability of such an approach, with the knowledge graph being traversed in the user’s browser to gather the materials for display. It uses the Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework, which provides the basis for a range of music-related Linked Data applications. In this paper, we describe and illustrate the application in use, its technological underpinnings, as well as the motivation and implementation experience