No source: created in electronic format.
The Music Encoding Initative (MEI), started as a ‘one man show’ at the University of Virginia. Perry Roland first designed an XML based encoding scheme for representing music notation according to principles and concepts that the Text Encoding Initiative was putting into practice for scholarly text encoding (Kepper, 2010). This effort addressed academic encoding approaches since the beginning, thus attracting a group of scholars interested in building a community around the MEI specification. In 2007, the format underwent its first cooperative improvements that added support for medieval notation, editorial interventions, and alignment with facsimile.
These personal initiatives prompted further involvement and soon could be channeled into the formation of a MEI study group in 2009. Since then, institutional support and public funding helped improving MEI. A project funded by the NEH and DFG led to the first community effort by making the first non-beta release of MEI publicly available in May 2010 (Röwenstrunk 2010). To date, the MEI has developed into an open and community-driven effort involving a council, a technical team and a growing user group.
This emerging community intends to improve the involvement of musicology within the Digital Humanities field. With this aim, some members have previously introduced examples of MEI usage to the DH community (see Kepper 2010; Viglianti 2010). Today, MEI’s users are mostly involved in projects that employ the format and/or develop software to support MEI use. This poster intends to demonstrate some of these efforts, particularly concerning the tool support for day-to-day work of the scholar for entering music notation and metadata, creating facsimile alignments and for the production of digital editions.
Transcribing or entering music notation with a computer is typically a more laborious task than transcribing text; this is because, unlike letters, music symbols themselves require complex codes to be represented. Many machine-readable formats, such as Humdrum or Lilypond, rely on ASCII-based structures which can be more or less intuitive to type. However, the most common note entry is done with WYSIWYG score editors, which allow the transcriber to enter the notation directly on a virtual score.
Note entry also lies at the heart of encoding music documents with MEI; however, encoding music notation in XML immediately poses a problem of overlapping hierarchies, because the score is organized as a grid that represents temporal sequence horizontally (one event comes after the other, such as a sequence of notes) and temporal co-occurrence vertically (events occur at the same time, such as a chord on the piano). The general complexity of music codes and the unavoidable workarounds for dealing with this condition makes hand-encoding a strenuous task.
Given these premises, it is evident that tools are necessary to enter music notation into the MEI format in a more intuitive manner. At this stage of MEI development as a community, there are some options available for simplifying note entry.
1. WYSIWYG score editors. In the past ten years, MusicXML has had outstanding success as an interchange format between different score editors. As a consequence, most specialized software now provide an export to MusicXML. The MEI provides XSLT stylesheets to convert from MusicXML 1.0 and 2.0 to MEI, which makes it possible to use score editors’ exports to be converted into MEI. This, nonetheless, is not necessarily a straight-forward process. Given the graphical, non-linear organization of notation on the page, each score editor can be more or less precise about the graphical positioning of symbols on the page. Symbols such as directions, phrase marks, and dynamics are particularly affected as they can be attached either to a staff, a measure, or a specific event on the staff. These differences are seemingly innocuous to the score editor’s users because their rendition on the page looks the same. However, when moving into a semantic representation system such as MEI, the associations of different symbols and their start/end points matter. Notwithstanding these difficulties, using score editors and MusicXML still simplifies note entry in MEI. Some post-processing, however, is still necessary.
2. MEI-specific score editors. As described above, MEI has existed for more
than ten years, but has experienced a considerable community effort only in
more recent times. Amongst several uplifting activities, a few focused on
the creation of WYSIWYG editors able to export directly into MEI. The
TextGrid component MEI Score Editor (MEISE) is the most complete to date.
3. XML editors. The first two solutions may be sufficient for most encoding
scenarios, especially if MEISE grows to be more comprehensive and/or is followed
by other open source efforts for creating MEI exports for more common score
editors. It is possible to imagine, however, that MEI will be used for
deep-encoding projects, such as critical editions, diplomatic or genetic
transcriptions, analyses, etc. For such scenarios, it is debatable that a
generic tool would be able to cover all uses. Obtained as an heritage from Text
Encoding Initiative, MEI’s flexibility is both a blessing and a curse. It allows
one to use the format as a framework within which it is possible to build
specific encoding models through customizations; at the same time, though, it
makes it impossible to build tools that can cater for all possible declinations
of the format.
MEI as a format was – amongst other goals – initially intended to ‘represent
the common expressive features of traditional facsimile, critical, and
performance editions’,
With the latest possibilities for note entry and score rendering, digital editions are going to reach a higher level of quality. For example, searching and analysing music editions would become possible, similarly to what already happens in digital editions of literature. Moreover, readability and usability would be improved by selectively rendering scores in modern or old notation or in different keys.
The Edirom project started in 2006 with the aim to provide tools for creating
and presenting historico-critical music editions. The project was one of the
main contributors in moving MEI to a community-driven standard.ad hoc generated notation and allow
interaction with musical snippets like switching versions or highlighting
specific symbols. Eventually, editions will no longer have to be constrained
to providing one single edited text for scholars;
In order to provide these functionality and level of knowledge, one needs a
detailed encoding of music documents as described above, and a considerable
amount of interlinking. Such data may then be used in the Edirom Editor for
creating digital music editions. The Editor, for example, provides: a)
mechanisms to link structural, musical information (like a movement or
measure) to regions on facsimiles; b) functions for formally describing
relationships or differences between these music documents. Some of the
specific tasks in the workflow of creating digital editions are handled by
specific tools outside or included within the Edirom Editor; such as
semi-automated recognition of measure positions with Optical Music
Recognition techniques or describing the metadata of a document, which is
done with a included version of the Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI
Data (MerMEId) from the Danish Centre for Music Publication.
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digitaler Editionen aus Sicht des Edirom-Projekts. Die
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Detmold. Available at https://www.textgrid.de/fileadmin/TextGrid/konferenzen_vortraege/fachbeirat_0710/meise.pdf
(accessed November 2011).
Kepper, J. (2010). A Data Model for Digital Musicology and its
Current State – The Music Encoding Initiative. Digital Humanities
2010, London. Available at
http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-817.html
(accessed November 2011).
Pierazzo, E. (2010). Editorial teamwork in a digital
environment: the edition of the correspondence of Giacomo Puccini. Jahrbuch für Computerphilologie 10.
Röwenstrunk, D. (2010). Digital Music Notation Data Model and
Prototype Delivery System. Forum Musikbibliothek 31.
Viglianti, R. 2010. Critical Editing of Music in the Digital
Medium: an Experiment in MEI. Digital Humanities 2010,
London. Available at http://dh2010.cch.kcl.ac.uk/academic-programme/abstracts/papers/html/ab-819.html
(accessed November 2011).