[MEI-L] NeoScribe

[Jason Stoessel]

Dear MEI listers

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jason Stoessel. I hold a PhD in music, with a specialisation in late 14th/early 15th century music, music notation and musical cultures. I also have a keen interest in computer programming (undoubtedly full of bad habits as an autodidact), and once made a small living from it before pursuing my music research interests. You can find some of my research publications on academia.edu, and I maintain a blog at jjstoessel dot wordpress dot com (remove the “dots” to obtain the correct URL). 

I would like to share briefly some work that John Stinson (director the La Trobe Medieval Music Database) and I have been doing to convert a large body of encoded music notation from Stinson’s proprietary Scribe program to a new MEI-compliant data schema that we call NeoScribe. Scribe was developed between 1984 and 1996 to encode every meaningful mark on a page of medieval music notation (mostly 14th century chant and mensural notation) and in many ways remains unparalleled in its capabilities. Despite its age and granted that it needs to be replaced with a more current user interface metaphor, Scribe still runs effectively on DOS Box. While MEI already has modules that partly support the encoding of chant notation and mensural music notation, we soon discovered that they were not sufficient for encapsulating the range of music notation data present in Scribe data files. A new module that extends the "Neume Notation" and "Mensural Notation" modules of MEI was required. One thing that encouraged us in this endeavour is the stated view of the MEI project team that MEI's modular nature invited researchers to add other modules that addressed their specific requirements. Stinson and I presented a paper at the Digital Humanities Australasia 2014 conference entitled "Towards an Open Access Standard for Encoded Medieval Music Notation: NeoScribeXML” which details some of our efforts to date. Further details can be found on my blog listed above.

To date we have produced a command line tool for converting Scribe files to NeoScribe files. A copy of the open source code for this tool can be found on GitHub, http://github.com/jjstoessel/Scribe2NeoScribe. We are not making any claims that this initial release of alpha version software is fit for widespread use and that the data it currently produces reflects the eventual definition of the MEI NeoScribe schema. It is untested alpha software. A beta release will occur in the next 12 months or so, including documentation for the new NeoScribe schema for those happy to wait. While the original user base of Scribe was small, we anticipate the Scribe2NeoScribe tool will be beneficial to the owners of additional data encoded by musicologists who have used Scribe in the past, and perhaps to data curators who might wish to make old data once again useful and able to be read on modern computers.

In the near future, we expect to be able to provide the MEI NeoScribe data for some 6000 pieces of music. Presently we are working towards ensuring that existing Scribe data is full encapsulated in NeoScribe and that some further extensions of mensural notation are incorporated to deal with the innovations of the late fourteenth century, including its multiplicities of note shapes. We are considering how this might be integrated with other projects like the SMuFL which now includes a comprehensive layer of glyphs for mensural notation.

Good regards,

Jason Stoessel

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Dr Jason Stoessel
2013-14 International Research Visitor (Oxford University)
Balzan Programme in Musicology
"Towards a Global History of Music"
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2014 Associate Investigator
ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
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Adjunct Research Fellow
School of Arts
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
University of New England
ARMIDALE NSW 2351
jason.stoessel at une.edu.au
Skype ID: jjstoessel
FaceTime: jason.stoessel at gmail.com
UK Mobile: 07741 796 686
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