[MEI-L] Notation type

[Raffaele Viglianti]

Hello,


>
> By the way, I don't think there's anything like this in TEI, so I wonder
> what the reasons were for not including something like this there.  Can
> anyone enlighten me?
>

As far as I know, TEI's guidelines keep agnostic on the typology of document
being encoded, or the script used, etc.

Let alone the fact that TEI's <text> structure roughly mimes a book (front,
body, back), I think they didn't provide a closed list of types of documents
to avoid the abuse that you see in LaTeX, where "article", "report", etc.
have become a setting for formatting behaviour, rather than indicate that a
document really is an article or a report.

The manuscript description component of the TEI header could function as
example for this specific situation. There is <scriptDesc> and
*cough*<musicNotation>*ack* that both contain a prosaic description of
scripts or the music notation found in the manuscript. <scriptDesc>, having
been thought out better than <musicNotation>, also contains <scriptNote>,
which surrounds the specific type of script (e.g. <scriptNote
xml:id="CM">carolingian minuscule</scriptNote>) that can be referred within
the text (e.g. <handShift script="#CM" />.

Following this example, describing a music text's notation would be the
encoder's responsibility and there'd be no restriction on how it'd be
expressed, only "where". Which means, of course, that for non-standard
notation you'd need a human to figure out exactly what notation the document
uses. MEI could provide an element where to do put this sort of description
in the header. The TEI examples above come from sourceDesc/msDesc, but in
our case one may want to specify the typology of notation regardless of
whether the MEI has a physical source or not...

I think that looking at the modules used can give a good hint to an
application trying to determine the notation(s) used in the MEI document.
For a more detailed classification, the application can at least locate a
<musicNotationDesc> (or equivalent, especially if we can repurpose an
existing element) and return it to a human reader who should be able to make
sense of it. Finally, being able to point to descriptions of different
notating styles (equivalent to <tei:scriptNote>) could be helpful to
describe changes in notating styles within one document (e.g. if a choir
book switches from neumatic to mensural -not sure if this makes historical
sense, but I imagine it could?).

Hope this helps!

Best,
Raffaele



> Regards,
>
> --
> p.
>
> __________________________
> Perry Roland
> Music Library
> University of Virginia
> P. O. Box 400175
> Charlottesville, VA 22904
> 434-982-2702 (w)
> pdr4h (at) virginia (dot) edu
> ________________________________________
> From: mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de [
> mei-l-bounces at lists.uni-paderborn.de] on behalf of Andrew Hankinson, Mr [
> andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 20, 2011 1:05 AM
> To: Music Encoding Initiative
> Subject: [MEI-L] Notation type
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've been looking through the documentation and I cannot seem to find a
> method (element or attribute) for specifying the type of notation being
> encoded.
>
> We have modules for mensural, tablature, neumes, etc., but once the schema
> is constructed from these modules there seems to be no way of specifying the
> type of notation used. It seems that the type of notation can only be
> derived implicitly by looking at the elements and attributes present in the
> encoding.
>
> There is the "@type" attribute on some possible candidate elements (<score
> />, for example), but that seems like it's meant to be generic and can be
> used for just about anything.
>
> This seems like it should be possible, but I can't find it. Have I missed
> something?
>
> Thanks,
> -Andrew
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