ODD Structures and Where to Find Them

In the past twenty years, the technical setup of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) data framework has been adjusted several times. Each of those transitions was motivated by the wish to improve the ways in which MEI could be integrated with other formats, to simplify the maintenance of MEI, and to encourage more people to actively contribute to the development of MEI. Some of those objectives are contradictory, and accordingly, there is no single right answer for all times about the best possible technical setup for MEI. The main purpose of this poster is to give a historical overview of the technical setups that MEI has gone through in the 20 or so years of its existence, and to illustrate the current workflows. Ideally, this empowers wider parts of the community to contribute to the continued development of both the MEI specification and documentation. Eventually, it will explain the steps necessary to set up a local working environment to participate in these developments

Musikedition im Zeichen neuer Medien. Historische Entwicklung und gegenwärtige Perspektiven musikalischer Gesamtausgaben

Die Keimzelle der Musikwissenschaft als geisteswissenschaftlicher Disziplin liegt in den Bemühungen des 19. Jahrhunderts, die Werke herausragender Komponisten zu konservieren und einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit zu erschließen. In diesem Umfeld erschien im Jahr 1851 der erste Band der Bach-Gesamtausgabe, herausgegeben von der Leipziger Bachgesellschaft. Alle nachfolgenden Musiker-Ausgaben entwickelten sich auf dieser Basis und reizten die Möglichkeiten des Buchmediums in zunehmenden Maße aus. Seit etwa zehn Jahren wird versucht, das Potential digitaler Medien für die Musikphilologie zu erschließen. Ausgehend von der Geschichte musikwissenschaftlicher Ausgaben und einer kritischen Reflektion des bisher Geleisteten, weist dieser Band mögliche neue Perspektiven für zukünftige, dem neuen Medium angemessene Editionsformen auf

Digital Music Notation Data Model and Prototype Delivery System

The UVa Library requests $161,175 in outright funds from NEH to collaborate with the University of Paderborn in Detmold, Germany, to produce a Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) demonstration project and to engage in dissemination efforts that will establish MEI as the predominant academic encoding standard for music notation. The demonstration project will include basic software for transforming material into MEI, a searchable archive of representative MEI-encoded data, and a prototype delivery system for items in the archive. This will allow the scholarly community to overcome the limitations of today's printed editions by extending the potential of digital editions, implementing new methodological techniques for music research, and facilitating collaboration between musicologists

Digital Music Notation Data Model and Prototype Delivery System

The U.Va. Library requests $44,164 in outright funds from NEH to collaborate with the University of Paderborn in Detmold, Germany, in conducting two workshops, one to be held in summer 2009 and one in spring 2010, which will promote an international collaboration to create a music notation data model and prototype delivery system. We intend to engage a select group of international scholars and technologists with a broad range of expertise in discussing the features and functions required in a scholarly XML music notation model, critically evaluate the existing data models, discuss optimum solutions for achieving the desired features, and plan for future implementation of the solutions. Our long-term plans include applying for further grant funding to continue to develop this project after this basic collaboration is complete

Encoding Genetic Processes II

Traditional music philology aims at establishing an edited text, which is supposed to stage a clearly identified and well-reasoned version of a musical work. Such a text will always depend on sources used for its preparation and decisions taken by the editor(s). However, the intention is to deliver a product – a static text, which resembles a specific combination of the transmitted sources of the work in question. In Genetic Editing, the focus lies elsewhere: Instead of justifying a specific product version, the intention is to trace the creative processes involved in the composition of that work. Obviously, those processes are only accessible through transmitted documents as well, but those documents do not need to contain full texts, nor are they only relevant when the composition has already matured enough to more or less reflect the final work. The Beethovens Werkstatt project is one of the first endeavors to explore the applicability of Genetic Editing to music. Several years ago, a presentation at MEC 2015 in Florence introduced the first findings of the project and illustrated the then novel approaches of encoding genetic processes in MEI [2]. The discussions of the conceptual model proposed there eventually led to the introduction of several new elements into MEI. Since then, not only MEI has evolved, but also the project. The paper at hand reflects on data model considerations for the project’s current module

ODD Structures and Where to Find Them

In the past twenty years, the technical setup of the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) data framework has been adjusted several times. Each of those transitions was motivated by the wish to improve the ways in which MEI could be integrated with other formats, to simplify the maintenance of MEI, and to encourage more people to actively contribute to the development of MEI. Some of those objectives are contradictory, and accordingly, there is no single right answer for all times about the best possible technical setup for MEI. The main purpose of this poster is to give a historical overview of the technical setups that MEI has gone through in the 20 or so years of its existence, and to illustrate the current workflows. Ideally, this empowers wider parts of the community to contribute to the continued development of both the MEI specification and documentation. Eventually, it will explain the steps necessary to set up a local working environment to participate in these developments

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

Supporting musicological investigations with information retrieval tools: an iterative approach to data collection

Digital musicology research often proceeds by extending and enriching its evidence base as it progresses, rather than starting with a complete corpus of data and metadata, as a consequence of an emergent research need. In this paper, we consider a research workflow which assumes an incremental approach to data gathering and annotation. We describe tooling which implements parts of this workflow, developed to support the study of nineteenth-century music arrangements, and evaluate the applicability of our approach through interviews with musicologists and music editors who have used the tools. We conclude by considering extensions of this approach and the wider implications for digital musicology and music information retrieval

Supporting musicological investigations with information retrieval tools: an iterative approach to data collection

Digital musicology research often proceeds by extending and enriching its evidence base as it progresses, rather than starting with a complete corpus of data and metadata, as a consequence of an emergent research need. In this paper, we consider a research workflow which assumes an incremental approach to data gathering and annotation. We describe tooling which implements parts of this workflow, developed to support the study of nineteenth-century music arrangements, and evaluate the applicability of our approach through interviews with musicologists and music editors who have used the tools. We conclude by considering extensions of this approach and the wider implications for digital musicology and music information retrieval