[MEI-L] NeoScribe

[TW]

Dear Jason,

it's great to hear about more active projects working with neumatic
notation and MEI.  For the Corpus monodicum project[1] (lead by the
Universität Würzburg and the Akademie der Wissenschaften Mainz), we
developed a transcription tool called mono:di[2] at Notengrafik
Berlin[3] that is based on the current MEI Neumes module created by
Stefan Morent. I'm intending to send a separate mail about this
software to MEI-L shortly.

We, too, were about to create a modification of the Neumes module
which we'd like to use in the next version of our software.  It will
be some time until we'll be starting work on this next version.  This
has lead me to procrastinate discussing suggestions for how the Neumes
module could be modified (which I feel guilty about as I already
announced/promised this some time ago).

Is it possible to access the encoded music from the La Trobe Medieval
Music Database?  Also, is there a way of accessing the Scribe software
or at least some of its documentation?

I'd love to see some sample of your MEI encoded chants.  I'll ask
Corpus monodicum editors whether it's possible to share a sample of
our data as well, ideally with some facsimile (if legally possible).

I'd suggest taking this opportunity and actually start a discussion
about how the Neumes module should evolve.  To prevent any further
procrastination on my side, I'm setting myself May 7th as the date for
providing suggestions in the form of commented samples and/or an ODD.

Looking forward to learning more about your work
Thomas Weber


[1] http://corpus-monodicum.de/
[2] https://monodi.corpus-monodicum.de/
[3] http://notengrafik.com/



2014-04-14 7:38 GMT+02:00 Jason Stoessel <jason.stoessel at une.edu.au>:
> 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
>
> --
> Dr Jason Stoessel
> 2013-14 International Research Visitor (Oxford University)
> Balzan Programme in Musicology
> "Towards a Global History of Music"
> --
> 2014 Associate Investigator
> ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions
> --
> 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
> Overseas Mobile: +37257 087 172
>
>
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