The field of musicology is constantly being enriched with digital, searchable music data. This trend opens new research possibilities; conversely, it requires new abilities to work with numerous data sets efficiently. Digital tools facilitate searching large music corpora and serve music analysis well. Nevertheless, there is still a potential to…[Read more]

Musical scores are frequently annotated with harmonic information, but widely used text-based methods rely on a limited number of visual channels. Though glyph-based methods exploit more channels, existing systems often violate perceptual design principles when employing color and rarely capture the frequency of chordal changes or their harmonic…[Read more]

Chord-based harmony is an important aspect of many types of Western music, across genres, regions, and historical eras. However, the consistent representation and comparison of harmony across a wide range of styles (e.g., classical music, Jazz, Rock, or Pop) is a challenging task. Moreover, even within a single musical style, multiple theories of…[Read more]

NFDI4Culture is the consortium for research data on material and immaterial cultural heritage and offers a user-centered and research-led infrastructure. By focusing on the digital capture as well as data-based research of cultural assets, NFDI4Culture brings together different disciplines in their research interests but also in terms of their…[Read more]

MEC 2021 BEST POSTER AWARD. The OpenScore Lieder Corpus is a collection of over 1,200 nineteenth century songs encoded by a dedicated team of mostly volunteers over several years. Having reported on the initial phase, motivations, design, and community-oriented aspects of the project before, we present here the first, stable, large-scale release…[Read more]

PROFMUS is a collaborative project that aims to carry out the research and consolidation of information to support further research about the Portuguese musicians active in the period from 1750 to 1986. The information to be collected must include as many relevant attributes as possible, especially about their academic background, professional…[Read more]

Performance of music in the home was the means by which most works were received before the advent of audio recordings and broadcasts, yet the notation sources that form our primary record of this culture have not been the subject of comprehensive or methodical study. Choices made by arrangers adapting music for domestic consumption – of i…[Read more]

Library forms of cataloging may differ greatly from the cataloging requirements of musicological research projects: They are often not detailed enough and do not take a close enough look at aspects of content relevant to research, such as handwritten entries in materials, etc. Library catalog entries of individual documents stand on their own for…[Read more]

Metadata are a very broad and extremely differentiated subject and ranges from rudimentary catalog data to deeply indexed scientific catalogs (e.g., catalogs of works). In this paper, the concept of metadata in the context of MEI is first examined, before two examples are used to show that metadata are more than just rudimentary descriptions.…[Read more]

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 s…[Read more]

This paper aims to highlight, as a case study, the encoding of a Spanish traditional music corpus using the MEI standard for the development of an interactive traditional music database focused on preserving and disseminating this type of cultural expression in the field of music education as well as ethnomusicology research. It analyzes the…[Read more]

The ERC funded project European Ars Nova aims to study the corpus of poetry in Latin, Italian and French set to music by the polyphonists of the so-called Ars Nova. Since one of the main research goals of the project is the comparative study of musical and poetic texts, we are currently developing a web application that will allow readers to…[Read more]

With Music Performance Markup (MPM) we introduce a new XML format for describing musical performances in a systematic way. The format builds upon a series of mathematical models that capture the characteristics of performance features such as continuous tempo and dynamics transitions, articulations, and metrical accentuations. Bundled with MPM…[Read more]

Music and the scholarship around it can be challenging to present in the forms associated with books and articles – primarily linear and with an emphasis on the static and visual over the sonic and interactive. We introduce the Lohengrin TimeMachine, a multiple-path multimedia app, optimised for a touch-screen tablet. The app offers two essays a…[Read more]

Digital symbolic music scores offer many benefits compared to paper-based scores, such as a flexible dynamic layout that allows adjustments of size and style, intelligent navigation features, automatic page-turning, on-the-fly modifications of the score including transposition into a different key, and rule-based annotations that can save hours of…[Read more]

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…[Read more]

This paper presents the recent implementation of encoded music notation in two open access platforms of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) devoted to traditional music and polyphony, respectively: Fondo de Música Tradicional IMF-CSIC (FMT)1 and Books of Hispanic Polyphony IMF-CSIC (BHP)2. Even though, at first, both repertories seem…[Read more]

This panel submission for the 2021 Music Encoding Conference brings together five short papers that focus on the making of computer-readable encodings of polyphony in the notational style – mensural notation – in which it was originally copied. Mensural notation was used in the medieval West to encode polyphony from the late thirteenth to six…[Read more]

Drawing on collaborative research at The National Archives, including through the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council’s programme Towards a National Collection, this talk explores computational archival science, artificial intelligence, citizen involvement, and post-custodial approaches to challenge doom-laden technological determinism, and h…[Read more]

Musicology is a small discipline within the wide spectrum of human knowledge, yet it is already divided into various branches […]. Although they share their object of investigation – “the art of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon” –, these branches very often ignore one another. Research in musicology is mostly…[Read more]