[MEI-L] neumes samples anywhere?

[TW]

Thanks for your very detailed responses, Stefan and Andrew.

I'm aware that neumes originally don't record the exact pitch, but I
already saw that the neumes in this example were on lines[1].  That's
why I asked, and no, I don't regret it at all :-).

To sum it up, if I want to find out where the neumes were positioned,
I currently would have to derive this from the <note>s inside the
<uneume> elements.  (If we have diastematic neumes.)  But we can
expect to hear more from what's being developed in Tübingen.

Thomas


[1] http://www.ccarh.org/publications/cm/12/02/


2011/12/15 Prof. Dr. Morent <stefan.morent at uni-tuebingen.de>:
> 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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>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
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