[MEI-L] neumes samples anywhere?

[Prof. Dr. Morent]

Hi Andrew, Thomas,

1. The scribes that notated the music of Hildegard von Bingen in the  
scriptorium of her monastery (probably some fellow sisters or monks  
from monasteries nearby) were rather advanced and already wrote neumes  
on a stave.
Typically this notation uses 4 to 5 lines with c- and f-clef (the  
c-line in yellow, the f-line in red ink). The neumes are transferred  
to the stave with only slight changes to the shapes of so called  
adiastematic neumes which are not written on lines at all (there only  
survives a single example of such adiastematic writing of Hildegard's  
scriptorium).
So the pitch information for these neumes is more or less perfectly  
readable (although there remain many open questions for performance:  
e.g. which was the tuning system andd which absolute pitch was meant  
with the note "e" f. ex.).

An example of the original notation can be found here:
http://www.dimused.uni-tuebingen.de/hildegard_notation.php


This pitch information is encoded within the MEI-files of "O  
splendidissima" or "O vos imitatores".
In fact the MEI neumes viewer uses this pitch information to position  
the notes in the transcription within in the browser.

2. What Andrew was describing is in fact the complexity (and only a  
part) of adiastematic neumes.
For their additional information we are pereparing to enlarge and to  
modify the MEI neumes module, so that it will be able to cover neumes  
written on lines and adiastematic neumes.

They only can be made readable as far as pitches are concerned if a  
(mostly later) source is found with the same melody written on lines.

In some rare cases also certain patterns of neumes which stand for  
modal formulas can be "translated" into pitch information without  
having such a parallel source.

Alas, in some cases, such a source was never found - and thus the  
music written in neumes will forever hide its exact pitch contour  
(this is the case f.ex. for the repetory of "Old Hispanic" chant).

Stefan


Zitat von "Andrew Hankinson, Mr" <andrew.hankinson at mail.mcgill.ca>:

> 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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