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

  • 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.

  • Brainstorming on the Encoding of Eastern Neumes: Middle-Byzantine Notation as a Case-Study  
    In category: encoding challenges, non-western script.
    Uploaded by Elsa De Luca on 9 October 2023.

    Authors: De Luca, Elsa / Alexandru, Maria / Fujinaga, Ichiro
    ABSTRACT
    The effort to encode neumatic notations has primarily focused on Western European repertories, with little attention given to the neumes employed in the East. To address this gap, we propose to apply our knowledge of the MEI Neumes Module and Eastern notations to raise awareness on some methodological issues that have hindered modern scholars from encoding Eastern neumes. Our case study is the Middle Byzantine notation, employed from the mid-12th-century to about 1815 across a large geographical area encompassing mainly Eastern Europe and part of the Middle East. This notation has been chosen since it has many points of contacts with Western notations but, at the same time, its basics differ radically from what we encounter in the West.

    In the East, music scripts are of the ‘articulatory’ type, serving as a guide on how to make music, almost similar to a tablature style of notation. In Western notation the performance is captured mostly within the neume. In the East notation is context sensitive and its interpretation depends on different factors, such as the genre and style of melopoeia, the mode, the melodic formula, the place within the musical phrase, the poetic text, and the liturgical frame. This fundamental difference has also an impact on the kind and number of signs employed in the notations. Middle-Byzantine notation offers an impressive number of combinations and positioning of signs including neumes that provide specific interval information and subsidiary or cheironomic signs indicating the musical ‘Gestaltung’, which implies rhythmical properties, grouping, and phrasing of the interval signs, dynamics, ethos of the formulas, as well as different levels of ornamentation and melodic expansion, according to the context. Possibly, the most difficult feature to be captured in the encoding of Middle-Byzantine notation is the relative position of the signs in the notational space; indeed, their relative positioning (above, below, next) can change the overall interpretation of all the related signs.

    When considering the graphical appearance and semantic of neumes, we should adopt both approaches to the encoding of Middle-Byzantine notation. It is crucial to be able to capture in the encoding even the finest details because this notation is very precise and conveys musical meaning through the tiniest graphical feature. On the other hand, encoding the semantic of the neumes should remain possible and open since, besides the basic intervallic structure of the pieces, the other dimensions of the music have to be interpreted in the light of oral tradition. Therefore, it would be desirable to include information on historically informed practice, which is available through musical treatises, manuscripts, and the oral tradition of Byzantine Chant. Middle-Byzantine neumes are therefore rich in metadata and their encoding should also include the names of the neumes in Greek, possibly with transliteration, translation, and etymology.

    We hope that our presentation can actively contribute to the ongoing discussions on encoding of non-Western early notations, particularly the Middle-Byzantine notation, and encourage a collaborative effort to find the most effective way to encode Eastern neumes.

    Bibliography
    De Luca, Elsa, and Haig Utidjian. 2023. Challenging the MEI Neumes Module: Encoding Armenian Neumes. In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, Dalhousie University, 19–22 May 2022, ed. by Jennifer Bain and David M. Weigl. Forthcoming.

    De Luca, Elsa, Jennifer Bain, Inga Behrendt, Ichiro Fujinaga, Kate Helsen, Alessandra Ignesti, Debra Lacoste, and Sarah Ann Long. 2019. Capturing Early Notations in MEI: The Case of Old Hispanic Neumes. MusikTheorie-Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft 3: 229–49.

    De Luca, Elsa, Jennifer Bain, Inga Behrendt, Ichiro Fujinaga, Kate Helsen, Alessandra Ignesti, Debra Lacoste, and Sarah Ann Long. 2019. Cantus Ultimus’ MEI Neume Module and its Interoperability Across Chant Notations. Abstract. Music Encoding Conference, Vienna. Available at https://music-encoding.org/conference/abstracts/abstracts_mec2019/MEI%202019_De%20Luca%20et%20alii.pdf.

    Alexandru, Maria. 2017. Paleography of Byzantine Music: Scientifc and artistic quests (in Greek: Παλαιογραφία Βυζαντινής Μουσικής. Επιστημονικές και καλλιτεχνικές αναζητήσεις). Athens: Hellenic Academic Ebooks. https://repository.kallipos.gr/handle/11419/6487

    Siklafidis, Nikolaos, and Maria Alexandru. 2022. Font Design of Psaltic (Byzantine) Notation for Greek Musical Repertories. In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, Alicante 2021. (poster και αντίστοιχο κείμενο): https://hcommons-staging.org/deposits/item/hc:46011/ (3.12.2022).

    Troelsgård. Christian. 2011. Byzantine Neumes. Α Νew Introduction to the Middle Byzantine Musical Notation. MMB, Subsidia IX. Copenhagen: Tusculanum Press.

  • Encoding Transcultural Texts - Applying TEI to Early Modern Chinese Christian Literature  
    In category: non-western script.
    Uploaded by Wenlu Wang on 3 October 2023.

    This project centers on data modeling and encoding of early modern Chinese Christian literature. It demonstrates the effectiveness of structuring and encoding these texts in TEI-XML for accumulating and analyzing Chinese Christian text data, as well as contributes to the discussion on developing models for encoding and linking transcultural texts.

  • A multi-media dictionary of endangered languages with TEI Lex-0: A case study of Hatoma, Yaeyama Ryukyuan  
    In category: encoding challenges, non-western script.
    Uploaded by Natsuko Nakagawa on 26 September 2023.

    Currently, we are building a digital dictionary of Hatoma, a Yaeyama Ryukyuan language, in the TEI Lex-0 format (Romary and Tasovac 2018). The original dictionary was written by Shinichi Kajiku, a native speaker of Hatoma Ryukyuan and a linguist (Kajiku 2020). He spent more than 50 years compiling the dictionary, which was structured in a spreadsheet format by one of the authors in 2019 (Kajiku and Nakagawa 2021). The structured dictionary with audio files for each entry is now available online. We report some elements the dictionary contains and TEI Lex-0 does not assume yet.

  • Presentation Slides for " for Non-Western Scripts"  
    In category: non-western script.
    Uploaded by Christian Lück on 20 September 2023.

    Encoding right-to-left script in TEI-XML is a hassle unless one uses an editor that hides away the tags. The problem arises when element names in Latin script interrupt the right-to-left rendering on the editor screen by the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm. (Davis et al. 2022) However, hiding the tags is not the only solution. With <altIdent> TEI offers a means for declaring alternative names for elements and attributes: names in another language and even in another script. Thus, we can have valid right-to-left-only TEI documents in XML version 1.1, which are readable and editable while tags are visible.

    However, using <altIdent> quickly feels like introducing entropy to the schema. Therefore, the paper suggests not to translate, but to transliterate identifiers. Compared to translation, transliteration is a mechanical process. Implementations exist. Thus, generating a full ODD with element and attribute aliases in Arabic, Syriac, Hebrew, etc. script becomes simple and fast. It can be pre-built so that the hurdle for encoding non-western script in TEI becomes much lower. The from the paper's title is a tag transliterated to Syriac script: ܬܸ݂.