[MEI-L] neumes samples anywhere?

[Andrew Hankinson, Mr]

Hi Thomas,

There are a couple things to note about these examples:

1. The originals (and Stefan Morent can correct me if I'm wrong) were not on a staff. Any explicit pitches are actually supplied, since there are no absolute scale degrees given in this type of notation -- just relative directions for each neume. I don't have a link to the original images, but you can see an example of what this might look like here: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~aps/research/projects/neumes/neumes.php (scroll down...)

2. A neume functions like a standardized ligature; in other words, neumes are identified and distinguished by their shapes and how many notes they connect together into one grouping. This is determined by which direction the note components are going: e.g., if you have three notes ascending, the neume is likely a scandicus; an alternating up-down for three notes produces a torculus. So, in that sense neumes are actually just grouping functions for the notes themselves. They don't directly encode pitch information, but rather function as a "container" for pitch information.

If you look at the O splendissima example, you'll see that there are two clefs defined on staff 1 (two clefs on one staff is very common in early notation). Putting aside the fact that this is likely supplied in the encoding and not in the original, it is entirely possible to determine the neume position based on the clef, since the note/octave information would give the line position. But, like I said, it's entirely possible to have a neume with no pitches supplied, in which case you would simply have the shape.

To complicate matters even further, different styles of neume notation are interpreted in different ways; some forms of neume notation carry implicit (or even explicit) rhythmic instructions, or some carry implicit (or explicit) interval information, depending on the context of the neume and the practices of the community that originally wrote it (practices that are largely lost in time, since they were very rarely written). It would then be up to some form of processing--software or human--to determine how to interpret these shapes into some form of pitch information.

Are you sorry you asked now? :)

-Andrew

On 2011-12-15, at 11:48 AM, TW wrote:

> 2011/12/8 Andrew Hankinson, Mr <andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca>:
>> There are a couple examples in the old sample directory at tags/MEI_development_2011-07-22/trunk/Documents.
>> 
>> O Splendissima Gemma
>> O vos Imitatores
>> 
> 
> I noticed those examples don't record on which "scale step" the neumes
> are positioned.  AFAIKS there's only the att.xy class of attributes
> that would be suited to record the position.  It seems a bit odd to
> use those visual domain attributes to describe something logical.  I'd
> expect something along the lines of @line on <clef>s.
> 
> Thomas
> 
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