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

Using the Gamera framework for the recognition of cultural heritage materials

This paper presents a new toolkit for the creation of customized structured document recognition applications by domain experts. This open-source system, called Gamera, allows a user, with particular knowledge of the documents to be recognized, to combine image processing and recognition tools in an easy-to-use, interactive, graphical scripting environment. Gamera is one of the key technology components in a proposed international project for the digitization of diverse types of humanities documents

Document Recognition for a Million Books

National Science Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Service

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

Linking Music Metadata.

PhDThe internet has facilitated music metadata production and distribution on an unprecedented scale. A contributing factor of this data deluge is a change in the authorship of this data from the expert few to the untrained crowd. The resulting unordered flood of imperfect annotations provides challenges and opportunities in identifying accurate metadata and linking it to the music audio in order to provide a richer listening experience. We advocate novel adaptations of Dynamic Programming for music metadata synchronisation, ranking and comparison. This thesis introduces Windowed Time Warping, Greedy, Constrained On-Line Time Warping for synchronisation and the Concurrence Factor for automatically ranking metadata. We begin by examining the availability of various music metadata on the web. We then review Dynamic Programming methods for aligning and comparing two source sequences whilst presenting novel, specialised adaptations for efficient, realtime synchronisation of music and metadata that make improvements in speed and accuracy over existing algorithms. The Concurrence Factor, which measures the degree in which an annotation of a song agrees with its peers, is proposed in order to utilise the wisdom of the crowds to establish a ranking system. This attribute uses a combination of the standard Dynamic Programming methods Levenshtein Edit Distance, Dynamic Time Warping, and Longest Common Subsequence to compare annotations. We present a synchronisation application for applying the aforementioned methods as well as a tablature-parsing application for mining and analysing guitar tablatures from the web. We evaluate the Concurrence Factor as a ranking system on a largescale collection of guitar tablatures and lyrics to show a correlation with accuracy that is superior to existing methods currently used in internet search engines, which are based on popularity and human ratingsEngineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Travel grant from the Royal Engineering Society

Kodikologie und Paläographie im digitalen Zeitalter 2 - Codicology and Palaeography in the Digital Age 2

Der Einsatz digitaler Technik verändert den wissenschaftlichen Umgang mit der handgeschriebenen Überlieferung. Dieser Band vertieft Fragen zu Digitalisierung und Katalogisierung, zu automatischer Schrifterkennung und Schriftanalyse, und er erweitert eine Diskussion, die mit dem im letzten Jahr erschienenen ersten Band zur digitalen Handschriftenforschung angestossen worden ist: Welche Erkenntnisse können etwa naturwissenschaftliche Methoden liefern? Welche musik- und kunsthistorischen Fragestellungen lassen sich mit Hilfe moderner Informationstechnologien beantworten? Wie lassen sich Methoden einer digitalen Auswertung lateinischer Handschriften auf griechische, glagolithische oder ägyptische Texte anwenden? Der raum-zeitliche Rahmen der hier von einer internationalen Autorenschaft zusammengetragenen 22 wissenschaftlichen Beiträge reicht vom alten Ägypten bis ins Paris der Postmoderne. Mit Beiträgen von: Pádraig Ó Macháin; Armand Tif; Alison Stones, Ken Sochats; Melissa Terras; Silke Schöttle, Ulrike Mehringer; Marilena Maniaci, Paolo Eleuteri; Ezio Ornato; Toby Burrows; Robert Kummer; Lior Wolf, Nachum Dershowitz, Liza Potikha, Tanya German, Roni Shweka, Yacov Choueka; Daniel Deckers, Leif Glaser; Timothy Stinson; Peter Meinlschmidt, Carmen Kämmerer, Volker Märgner; Peter Stokes—Dominique Stutzmann; Stephen Quirke; Markus Diem, Robert Sablatnig, Melanie Gau, Heinz Miklas; Julia Craig-McFeely; Isabelle Schürch, Martin Rüesch; Carole Dornier, Pierre-Yves Buard; Samantha Saidi, Jean-François Bert, Philippe Artières; Elena Pierazzo, Peter Stokes. Einleitung von: Franz Fischer, Patrick Sahle. Unter Mitarbeit von: Bernhard Assmann, Malte Rehbein, Patrick Sahle

Information technological aspects in the field of music. Overview

Uurimuse põhieesmärgiks on anda lugejale ülevaade nootide (noodilehtede) ettevalmistamist ja muusika esitamist toetavatest tarkvarapakettidest ning tutvustada olulisemaid aspekte, mis on seotud nende rakendamisega muusikavallas. Üksikasjaliku ülevaate esitab töö tulemusena valminud veebisõelmete andmebaas koos seda esitava veebirakendusega, mis sisaldab nimetatud tarkvarapakette iseloomustavaid kirjeid. Töö tekstiline osa, st dokument, kirjeldab kokkuvõtlikult olulisemaid aspekte koos mõningate tarkvaraliste näidetega. Osutub, et kõige rohkem leidub internetis noodigraafika töötlemise ning diginoodiks teisendamise vahendeid – vastavalt 98 ja 13 rakendust. Nende valdkondadega seotud töö jaotistes sätestatakse erinevad kriteeriumid, mida nimetatud rakenduste andmebaasi kandmisel arvesse võeti, aga ka meetodeid ja probleeme, millega vastavate rakenduste kasutamisel arvestada tuleks. Uurimust alustades oli üks esmaseid eesmärke koguda võimalikult palju informatsiooni intelligentsete muusikaseadmete, eelkõige elektroonilis-intelligentsete noodipultide kohta. Paraku leidub just nimelt selles valdkonnas kõige vähem vahendeid – kokku vaid 4 rakendust, millest reaalselt kasutatav on vaid üks. Töös kirjeldatakse rakenduste võimalikke omavahelisi võrdlusmomente, analüüsitakse vaadeldava valdkonna nüansse ning tutvustatakse arenguperspektiive. Informatiivsuse huvides on esitletud aga ka tarkvarakomponente ja -pakette (sh raamistikke), mis kaudselt toetavad nootide (noodilehtede) ettevalmistamist ning muusika esitamist – kokku 55 kirjet. Lisaks kirjeldatakse muusikaõpet toetavaid vahendeid. Nendest on andmebaasi kantud kokku 14 rakendust. Antakse põgus ülevaade olemasolevatest huvitavamatest noodikogudest ning nende kasutamisvõimalustest; andmebaasi lisatud vastavalt 13 kirjet. Tutvustatakse aga ka uurimuse kontekstiga seotud bibliograafiat ning ühte tuntumat konverentsiseeriat (ISMIR), mille raames on paljud publikatsioonid valminud. Publikatsioonide loetelu on samuti lisatud töö käigus valminud andmebaasi – kokku 113 kirjet. Arvestades, et pakettide kasutajaliidesed on reeglina ingliskeelsed, on koostatud vastav inglise-eesti terminisõnastik.The main purpose of this thesis is to give an overview of the existing software packages and tools, oriented towards the simplification of musicians everyday work. Since the field is quite extensive, only a subset of the available software has been taken into account – mainly programs designed to support preparing and interpreting sheet music. The thesis is divided into two major components – a database (appended on a CD), which contains all the information about the collected data (software, hardware, related bibliography, etc) and the document itself, where the criterions for comparing the software packages are listed and explained together with some illustrative examples. The first two chapters of the document are dedicated to the ways of generating sheet music – describing and comparing the different software tools for displaying and editing sheet music using note graphics software. Also, an overview of intelligent music stands, which is still an underdeveloped branch in this field, is given. The third chapter of the document describes aspects of using music software as a learning intent complemented with some examples of a freeware program. Additionally, a slight overview of digital (sheet)music archives together with some interesting examples is given in the fourth chapter. Also, the field-specific bibliography (comprising years 1989-2012) is presented in the fifth chapter. In consideration of the fact that almost all user interfaces of the software packages use English language, an illustrated English-Estonian dictionary of relevant terms is appended. The database contains 184 entries of topic-related software packages – 4 intelligent music stand applications, 13 digital sheet music converter applications, 98 score editors, 14 study assistant applications and 55 miscellaneous applications; 13 digital note archives and 113 publications