Optical Music Recognition Workflow for Neume Notation and its Encoding & The Art of Teaching Computers

Closing keynote of the Music Encoding Conference 2022

A Notation-Free Approach to Encoding Commatic Drifts in Just Intonation

Musics in just intonation pose a wide number of challenges to encoding but perhaps none more imposing than their potential to freely drift through rational pitch space by minute intervals. Though such commatic drifts—whether Pythagorean, syntonic, septimal, or otherwise—are all too often framed as ‘problems’ inherent to rational tuning systems, the study of musics in which they are used as a compositional resource motivates a methodology that can sensibly account for them. This paper accordingly presents a pragmatic approach to encoding commatic drifts in just intonation deliberately divorced from any particular notation system and instead based on tracking changes both to and relative to (not necessarily sounded) ‘1/1’ reference fundamentals. Notably, this approach helps facilitate understandings of commatic drifts that can be obscured by compromises inherent to notation systems

Proposal to Adopt MEI for Encoding Traditional Japanese Music Scores

Encoding of western music notation is being standardized as a result of the dedicated work of the MEI and MusicXML communities. However, there is no machine-readable format for encoding traditional Japanese musical notation. This short paper discusses the use of MEI to encode traditional Japanese musical notation

Encoding Musical Performances

The musical performance of a score is a domain rarely addressed in a reasonable level of detail by current digital music editions. A main reason for this may be a lack of suitable data formats that are capable of encoding more than ambiguous performance symbols or rather technical measurement series. The Music Performance Markup format is a recent development that fills this gap. This workshop gives a practical introduction to the format. The core software tool to create performance encodings is MPM Toolbox. Participants familiarise themselves with it during the course of the workshop, have the opportunity to experiment and create their own performance encodings, and give feedback that will motivate future development

The mei-friend Web Application: Editing MEI in the Browser

mei-friend is a ‘last mile’ editor for MEI-encodings intended to alleviate the common task of cleaning up encodings generated via optical music recognition, or via conversion from other formats. The open-source tool, building on the earlier mei-tools-atom codebase, was first presented to the MEI community at MEC ‘21, and has received more than 500 downloads, demonstrating the demand for interactive MEI editing. Among the feedback we received at this presentation were requests to port the tool, which was implemented as a plugin package for the Atom text editor, to work in a generic Web browser environment; while Atom’s architecture is already built on a Chromium (browser) back-end, it is somewhat slow to use, and the installation process and requirement for a separate application may be off-putting to less technically-minded users. Here, we are pleased to present mei-friend in its new guise as a full-featured, cross-browser compatible Web application, with optimized performance and an extended set of features

Joseph Haydn Werke Metadata: MEI Way

The work of the Joseph Haydn Institute has been well-known in eighteenth-century studies and beyond since publishing the first four volumes of the Joseph Haydn Werke in 1958. As with any Gesamtausgabe undertaking, sources occupy a central role, and with them come massive amounts of data. Naturally, compilation and organization of the metadata occurred over the life of this project, with digitization only a comparatively recent focus. Multiple factors led to the development of an idiomatic schema. Inasmuch as this system served immediate needs and created a foundation for content findability, it created limitations in accessibility, interoperability, and reusability—all desirable or essential qualities for the online Joseph Haydn Portal. It creates a distinct set of challenges for creating a digital Werkverzeichnis within the portal, the most pressing of which is transforming data into a standardized format enabled for the necessary qualities. This poster provides an overview of this process using file samples, concordances for terms and structure, and presents the challenges involved in a project of this size, and the realities of planning the project life cycle

Singing another Tune: Open/Digital/Minimal Scholarly Edition of Castilian and Galician-Portuguese Lyric Poetry

Opening keynote of the Music Encoding Conference 2022

Mysterium: A Corpus of Alexander Scriabin's Music for Solo Piano

A new digital encoding of 207 works by Alexander Scriabin is reported. The corpus includes all of Scriabin’s works for solo piano with an opus number. Each work is in the **kern format, having first been encoded into Finale, exported to a MusicXML file, and then converted using the musicxml2hum command. The corpus’s content and method of encoding are detailed, as well as some complications of the encoding process

Challenging the MEI Neumes Module: Encoding Armenian Neumes

Chant notations are found across a large geographical area encompassing Europe and part of the Middle East (including the Levant and the historical Armenian lands). The Neumes Module represents a collective endeavour on the part of the MEI Community to capture in a machine- readable format the meaning of chant notations. In recent years intensive efforts were devoted towards improving the applicability of the MEI Neumes module, first applied almost exclusively to St Gall notation (also known as ‘East Frankish notation’), and recently extended to include the encoding of Old Hispanic, Aquitanian and square notations (MEI Neumes module, version 4.0). With this paper, we aim to contribute towards expanding the interoperability of the MEI Neumes module by testing it against the Armenian neumatic notation. From an encoding point of view, Armenian notation shows a higher degree of complexity compared to the neumatic notations so far tackled by MEI. Indeed, unlike all the neumatic notational systems hitherto dealt with by MEI, with the Armenian system we possess no information on either the melodic contour or the number of pitches associated with the neumes. Therefore, one of the fundamental elements of the current Neumes Module cannot be applied to the encoding of Armenian neumes: the ‘neume component’ , that is, a ‘sign representing a single pitched event, although the exact pitch may not be known’. Moreover, encoding Armenian neumes will serve to take even further the recent tendency to encode the visual appearance of the neumes rather than their semantics. In this paper, we outline the challenges of encoding Armenian notations with MEI and propose a solution applicable to future projects aiming at the digital analysis of the Armenian chant repertory

Community-Centered Sustainability: A Case Study of the Music Encoding Initiative

Lacking institutional support, the vast majority of digital humanities communities and their respective projects confront the pervasive challenge of sustainability. Shifts in technologies, resources, and communities over time present systemic barriers to the long-term viability of digital projects. The “Communities sustaining digital collections” project is investigating the roles of research communities in the sustainability of digital collections, with the purpose of identifying strategies to increase the long-term viability of their digital resources. Four unique case studies span several types of digital humanities projects: the Lakeland Digital Archive, the Open Islamic Text Initiative, the Enslaved.org project, and the Music Encoding Initiative. By conducting interviews with community members and users of these digital projects, we have observed some unifying themes, particularly regarding the symbiotic relationship between the maintenance of the digital object and the maintenance of the community of contributors and users. Of these case studies, the Music Encoding Initiative represents the longest-running and most geographically dispersed scholarly community, composed of technologists, musicologists, music theorists, and music librarians from around the world. This research community has engaged in the creation, maintenance, and adaptations of an open-source standard for encoding musical documents in machine-readable XML schema. Our paper will present preliminary outcomes of the case study of the Music Encoding Initiative, and how the MEI community understands sustainability in the context of their digital markup standard. This paper will also relate emergent findings from cross-case analysis of our broader study of community-centered strategies for sustaining digital humanities resources