[MEI-L] Music21 MEI support

Tue Jan 11 00:49:33 CET 2011

Mike has a good point here about "metadata that applies to specific parts
of a score". I can interpret that two ways--"parts" as in instrumental
parts of a performing score, but also "portions" as in the B section of a
movement, or simply a foreign hand that enters in some random part of a
musical work.

People who work only from printed sources will not be concerned with the
second, but people who work with manuscripts are regularly confronted with
many varieties of the second.

Thus I support the idea. I am wondering what the practicalities of
implementation in MEI are.

Eleanor

-----Original Message-----
From: mei-l-bounces+esfield=stanford.edu at lists.uni-paderborn.de
[mailto:mei-l-bounces+esfield=stanford.edu at lists.uni-paderborn.de] On
Behalf Of Michael Cuthbert
Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2011 11:13 PM
To: 'Music Encoding Initiative'
Cc: mei-l at lists.uni-paderborn.de
Subject: Re: [MEI-L] Music21 MEI support

Thanks Andrew and Don for the kind words about the project; it's great to
hear
such support.

For those on this list that might not know the project, music21 is a
toolkit
for computer-aided research in musicology and music theory.  It's
spiritual
forefather of course is the great Humdrum framework, but music21 aims for
a
more object-oriented approach that makes representing hierarchical musical
structures, and reusing code easier.  This approach has let us support a
number
of music encoding formats (most prominently MusicXML and Humdrum but also
abc,
Lilypond, musedata, base40, and MIDI and hopefully soon, though our
"plug-in"-like framework, Braille music notation).

As a musicologist, building a system that can deal with ambiguity and rich
Metadata is very important to me.  MEI is a very rich system there that we
hope
to watch closely and hopefully help it grow.  One of the things that the
music21 internal representation allows for is Metadata that applies to
specific
parts of a score.  So if you want to show that a particular 4 measure
passage
is not by Mozart, it can be tagged like that.  Or to show that there's
uncertainty about the date of one movement of a piece but not the rest,
that
can be done too.  I'd love to hear from more librarians about tools that
are
not currently present in notation software that will help with your work
and
analysis.

All the best,
Michael

---                                                     ---
Michael Scott Cuthbert
   Assistant Professor of Music, M.I.T.

4-246 Music and Theater Arts                +1-413-575-6024
77 Massachusetts Ave.               http://www.trecento.com
Cambridge, MA 02139                        cuthbert at mit.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: Byrd, Donald A. [mailto:donbyrd at indiana.edu]
Sent: Friday, January 07, 2011 21:16
To: Music Encoding Initiative; Andrew Hankinson, Mr
Cc: mei-l at lists.uni-paderborn.de
Subject: Re: [MEI-L] Music21 MEI support

For years Michael Cuthbert, the leader of the Music21 project, and I
have been exchanging e-mail, mostly about demanding features of music
notation but occasionally about things like visualizations of music,
especially coordinated visualizations, which we're both very interested
in. I like his ideas a lot, e.g., the fact that (or so he's told me) he
tells his students that "if a feature is in Don Byrd's [Extremes of
Conventional Music Notation]list, we have to at least try!" ...okay, I
may be a little biased about that :-) . Anyway, what I've seen of
Music21 is impressive.

--Don

On Thu, 6 Jan 2011 11:45:31 -0500, "Andrew Hankinson, Mr"
<andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've started writing a module to support MEI in Music21, a new music
> analysis package for Python from some folks at MIT. It's still at a
> very preliminary stage, but it will parse a couple of example MEI
> files, including the Bach Toccata & Fugue BWV 565 example (a fairly
> complex example).
>
> There's a long ways to go before it's fully implemented, but I
> thought I'd send it around to gauge interest and get feedback. You
> can find the code for it here:
>
> http://github.com/ahankinson/music21-mei
>
> If you're interested in using it, please read the README for more
> information on what it currently can and cannot do.
>
> If you don't know Music21, you can find out more about it here:
> http://mit.edu/music21/
>
> Any feedback, or even just "Hey, that's great! I can use this"
> messages would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
> -Andrew
>
> ======
> Andrew Hankinson, BMus, MLIS
> PhD Candidate in Music Technology
>
> Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
> in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT)
> Schulich School of Music, McGill University
> 555 Sherbrooke St. West
> Montréal, QC, Canada H3A 1E3
>
> Tel: 514.398.4535 x0300
> Fax: 514.398.8061
> andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca<mailto:andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca>
>
> h<http://www.music.mcgill.ca/~ahankinson>ttp://www.transientstudent.net
>
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>

--
Donald Byrd
Woodrow Wilson Indiana Teaching Fellow
Adjunct Associate Professor of Informatics & Music
Indiana University, Bloomington

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