Dorothy Parker asked about music markup languages. She is correct in noting the deficiencies of MusicXML, et al. These, along with the proposals for embedding musical notation in the new MPEG standard, are designed for modern (i.e., post-17th century notation).
The NEUMES project, begun at Harvard several years ago, is making headway in this area, at least for medieval chant. See: http://www.scribeserver.com/NEUMES/. I've just recently discovered this, and I will be examining this in some depth to see to what extent I can use this in my liturgical drama project.
Assuming the NEUMES folks achieve their objectives, though, a problem still remains with the notational schemes between chant and Bach (and even Bach can be troublesome).
/************************************************************** * Michael L. Norton, Ph.D. (Musicology) * Computer Science Dept. * MSC 4103 * James Madison University * Harrisonburg, VA 22807 * (540) 568-2777 * nortonml@jmu.edu **************************************************************/
-----Original Message----- From: dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca [mailto:dm-l-bounces@uleth.ca] On Behalf Of Dorothy C. Porter Sent: Thursday, August 05, 2004 8:20 AM To: dm-l@uleth.ca Subject: [dm-l] early music notation
Digital Medievalist Journal (Inaugural Issue Fall 2004). Call for papers: http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/cfp.htm ---------------- Hi list,
This is a message I sent as a reply to James Cummings on TEI-L, but I think it may be of interest to folks on this list as well (some of whom, I expect, will know more than me - I haven't studied medieval music since college). His original query concerned including the Medieval Encoding Initiative (MEI, http://dl.lib.virginia.edu/bin/dtd/mei/) as a module in the TEI. ******************** James (and list),
There are at least two other prospective XML schemas for encoding music - Music Markup Language (http://www.musicmarkup.info/) and MusicXML (http://www.musicxml.org/xml.html). I can't speak to the technical pros and cons of including music markup as a part of TEI. I do think that it is something to consider, especially for, as you say, liturgical manuscripts (or other early manuscripts that include musical notation).
Having looked briefly at all three of these markup schemas, though, it appears that all are designed specifically for modern Western musical notation - notes of determined length on a standard staff. This would be fine for encoding something like a 18th century hymnal, but less useful for 13th or 14th century notation (which might be on a staff, but rhythm is not always clear), and not useful at all for the earliest notation (basically squiggles written over the lyrics). It would be great to be able to describe these sorts of early notation beyond simply noting that they're there, but it doesn't appear that these schemas are designed with early notation in mind (at least not publically, yet).
Does anyone on the list know more? Is anyone interested in pursuing some sort of notation extension/module to TEI?
Dot
*************************************** Dorothy Carr Porter, Program Coordinator Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities University of Kentucky 351 William T. Young Library Lexington, KY 40506
dporter@uky.edu 859-257-9549 ***************************************
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