[MEI-L] [List of music-notation features; WAS] comment on MEI @clef.trans values

[Byrd, Donald A.]

Eleanor raises a _very_ important point, one I don't think we addressed 
directly in Charlottesville, at least not for more than a minute or 
two. What features of CWMN are worth including in Round 1 of the new 
MEI? For that matter, what features of CWMN exist? Coming up with a 
complete list is virtually impossible, but a reasonably comprehensive 
list would be very useful.

I'm pretty sure no such list exists, but there are places to start. My 
music-IR bibliography 
(http://www.informatics.indiana.edu/donbyrd/DonMusicIRBibliography.html) says 
of the Byrd & Isaacson "Music Representation Requirements" paper I keep 
mentioning:

'Attempts to classify and list, in terms of information represented, 
all symbols in CWMN (conventional Western music notation) that are 
significant in terms of making the music readable, strongly emphasizing 
"classical" music. Also includes some non-notational features of music 
like voice/part relationships and MIDI patches, plus analytic symbols, 
e.g., for Schenkerian graphs; but the authors intentionally exclude 
items that are largely relevant only to publishing like system and page 
breaks. Most of the article is a long table of features, over 200 in 23 
categories, with ratings of importance for academic musicians. This is 
the only serious attempt I know of to systematically list CWMN symbols 
for any purpose, with the possible exceptions of the recent and as yet 
unpublished 'Dagstuhl core" and the lists implied in DTDs and schemas 
for systems like MEI and MusicXML.'

Of the documents I mention, the MEI and MusicXML DTDs/schemas aren't 
intended as lists of features, of course. Of the other two, I think the 
Dagstuhl core is far too vague and incomplete to be a good starting 
point. Forgive me for tooting my own horn yet again, but Eric and I put 
a tremendous amount of work into our table, and I think it's the only 
sensible starting point. There are areas it excludes, and many things 
came up in Charlottesville that it doesn't include, so yes, it needs 
expanding. It shouldn't be hard to add items from the the Dagstuhl 
core; I've augmented Eleanor's list of examples correlated with it by 
adding a column giving the equivalent Byrd & Isaacson item no. for 
each, plus a column of comments. In my Examples folder, it's 
MEI09_Exx+Byrd&Isaacson_vs_Dagsuhl_Core.xls . (The paper itself is 
MusicRepReqForAcad1-09.doc .)

--Don



On Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:22:12 -0700, Eleanor Selfridge-Field 
<esfield at stanford.edu> wrote:
> Hi, Don,
>
> 15ma [quindicesima] makes a lot more sense than 15va [compounded from ottava
> + ottava], but 15mb makes no sense at all. I'm not persuaded that just
> because an instance of something exists, it needs to be accommodated in
> Round 1 of MEI.
>
> It might be good just to keep a list of exceptions that might be desirable
> for eventual inclusion (cf. the Dagstuhl core, which consigns them to Level
> 2).
>
> For exceptions of a more arbitrary nature (and Augenmusik in general), an
> annotation should suffice. This is especially true for works of recent
> decades, because in the current copyright climate, their encoding is
> unlikely.
>
> Eleanor
>
>
> [---- SNIP ----]
>


--
Donald Byrd
Senior Scientist
Adjunct Associate Professor of Informatics & Music
Indiana University, Bloomington