Joint MEC TEI conference 2023 — This group brings together material shared by the conference attendees.
The conference theme invites us to think about the need to encode different cultural realms — not only written musical and literary cultures, but also oral cultures, the cultures of underrepresented communities, and even cultural practices beyond language and music, such as dance, theater, and film. In coming together to identify and discuss the commonalities and differences between our two coding communities, we aim to discover new methods and new approaches to encoding culture in all its forms.

Files List

  • Five Aspects of ViFE – Organizing cooperation across project boundaries  
    In category: community, infrastructure, Text and Music.
    Uploaded by Andreas Münzmay on 27 October 2023.

    AUTHORS: Albrecht-Hohmaier, Martin / Capelle, Irmlind / Herold, Kristin / Kepper, Johannes / Münzmay, Andreas / Obert, Salome / Richts-Matthaei, Kristina / Saccomano, Mark / Seipelt, Agnes / Stadler, Peter / Ried, Dennis

    ABSTRACT:
    The Virtual Research Group Edirom (Virtueller Forschungsverbund Edirom, ViFE) is an association of current and former staff of the Detmold/Paderborn Department of Musicology involved in projects advancing digital methods in musicology. With more than 25 researchers currently involved in around a dozen different projects, ViFE is a major player in musicological Digital Humanities.
    ##A Knowledge Sharing Group

    The fundamental idea of ViFE is to be a group of experts in constant collaboration. Together, the expertise of ViFE members adds up to over 100 years of experience in digital music editions, ranging from computer science to philology and music history, from project management to Digital Humanities and information science – shared through weekly meetings and regular workshops within our group.
    ##Research Projects

    ViFE is named after the Edirom project, funded from 2006 to 2012. ViFE is involved in long-term projects, including Carl Maria von Weber Gesamtausgabe and Beethovens Werkstatt, but also has completed, or currently works on, several short-term projects and is constantly developing new project proposals.
    ##Standards

    ViFE has been deeply involved in both the TEI and MEI communities for many years. We continue to actively connect our research with others and apply our findings to the development of these encoding standards.
    ##Education and Training

    Since 2010, ViFE has organized the annual Edirom Summer School, one of the most important venues for learning MEI. Members of ViFE are also involved in Master’s programs on Digital Music Philology and on Digital Humanities at Paderborn University and supervise doctoral dissertations.
    ##Cooperation

    Our group is a vital part of NFDI4Culture and partners with many other institutions, such as Mainz Academy of Science and Literature, cemfi, CDMD, RISM, Beethoven-Haus Bonn, SLUB Dresden, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, BSB Munich, University of Oxford e-Research Centre, Gesellschaft für Musikforschung, and several German universities.

  • Notation editor for transcribing Hindustani Classical music ‘Bandish’  
    In category: non-western script, Text and Music.
    Uploaded by Kiran Ramakant Karkera on 26 October 2023.

    In this paper we present the Bhatkhande Bandish editor, a notation editor for transcribing Hindustani (North Indian classical music) compositions known as Bandish in a traditional notation system known as Bhatkhande notation.

    Hindustani classical music (HCM) is a traditional form of music practiced in the Indian subcontinent. In this paper, we describe a web-based notation editor capable of transcribing and rendering a Bandish in a traditional notation system, named the Bhatkhande notation system

    This editor is an open-source alternative to proprietary notation editors (Sawant n.d.) (SwarClassical n.d.). It offers two artifacts:

    - An open file format specification to store a Bandish document.
    - An open-source engine to render a Bandish on a web page.

    Additionally, making the project open source allows community contributions for Raga and Taal metadata which makes it easier to support new Ragas and Taals. It also makes it possible to support new Indic languages to display the notations in.

  • Presentation slides for "Studying Poetry through Music: The Tasso in Music Project"  
    In category: Text and Music.
    Uploaded by Craig Stuart Sapp on 19 September 2023.

    The Tasso in Music Project (https://tassomusic.org) is a complete digital edition of the early modern musical settings of the poetry of Torquato Tasso (1544–95), the most prominent poet of late sixteenth-century Italy. Comprising about 800 musical settings and representing the work of over 200 composers, this repertoire is significant not only for musical reasons—for instance, with many parallel settings of the same poems, the corpus lends itself especially well to comparative analysis—but also, and most importantly in this presentation, for literary reasons, since the musical settings can shed light on the dissemination of Tasso’s work and can offer insight into the form and meaning of his poems.

    Accordingly, besides providing newly made critical editions of the musical settings in a variety of electronic formats (Humdrum, MEI, MusicXML), the project features a substantial literary component whose function is to help us to better understand the tradition of the poetic texts and music/text relations. More specifically, the project includes TEI transcriptions of the poetic texts as they appear in musical settings and in contemporaneous literary sources, both manuscript and printed, as well as tools for the dynamic visualization of literary variants across sources. This textual component provides indispensable data for the study of the transmission of Tasso’s poetry, which is notoriously intricate as many of his poems survive in multiple versions with substantial variants. These data are of interest for musicologists, who can use them to trace the sources used by composers, to assess filiation between settings of the same poem, and to study possible manipulations of literary texts by composers. The data are equally interesting for literary philologists, who can use them to broaden their perspective on the tradition of Tasso’s texts, having access for first time to variants that are recorded only in musical sources, some of which may be ascribable to Tasso himself by virtue of his proximity to several major composers of the time.

    Likewise, building on the possibilities afforded by digital encoding, the Tasso in Music Project offers several online tools to study the interaction of poetry and music, both within single pieces and across the repertoire. The data for both music and poetry are also available for further offline and additional analyses. Currently available online analysis tools address the melismatic treatment of words and the use of textual repetition in the music–the latter is particularly useful to quickly identify keywords in a poem. In the presentation, we will also present new tools that will allow users to analyze the relationship between poetic prosody and musical durations/meter as well as between poetic and musical syntax (for instance, the correspondence, or lack thereof, between ends of poetic lines and cadences), showing how musical settings can function as parsings of a poem’s metric and syntactic structure.

    Through these tools, the Tasso in Music Project restores the centrality of poetry in early modern vocal music, addressing an interdisciplinary audience encompassing not only performers and scholars of music (historians, theorists, music encoders), but also scholars of literature (Italianists, linguists, textual encoders).