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

Composing and realising a game-like performance for disklavier and electronics

“Climb!” is a musical composition that combines the ideas of a classical virtuoso piece and a computer game. We present a case study of the composition process and realization of “Climb!”, written for Disklavier and a digital interactive engine, which was co-developed together with the musical score. Specifically, the engine combines a system for recognising and responding to musical trigger phrases along with a dynamic digital score renderer. This tool chain allows for the composer’s original scoring to include notational elements such as trigger phrases to be automatically extracted to auto-configure the engine for live performance. We reflect holistically on the development process to date and highlight the emerging challenges and opportunities. For example, this includes the potential for further developing the workflow around the scoring process and the ways in which support for musical triggers has shaped the compositional approach

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

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

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

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

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

Closing keynote of the Music Encoding Conference 2022

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