[MEI-L] Annotations visible on the music and arbitrary segmentation

[Roland, Perry D. (pdr4h)]

Looking at the CMME schema and a very limited set of instance documents, it seems that text can be specified at the note or staff level, as in the following example --

<Note>
  <Type>Brevis</Type>
  <Length>
    <Num>4</Num>
    <Den>1</Den>
  </Length>
  <LetterName>F</LetterName>
  <OctaveNum>3</OctaveNum>
  <ModernText>
    <Syllable>o</Syllable>
  </ModernText>
</Note>
<OriginalText>
  <Phrase>hostium</Phrase>
</OriginalText>

The syllable "o" is directly associated with this breve, while the text "hostium" appears to be associated with the staff/voice at the point where this note occurs.  MEI's <dir> is more advanced than CMME's <OriginalText> in that both the start and end points of the text can be identified.  The issue remains, however, that <dir> is not specific enough with regard to text underlay.  Again, I'd like to encourage the mensural community to provide a semantic description and element name for this kind of text.  Adding it to MEI and Verovio doesn't present a great challenge.  I also don't anticipate any difficulties mapping this yet-unnamed element to CMME or other similar schemes.

Unlike EsAC, MEI doesn't assume a one-to-one correspondence between notes and syllables. Multiple syllables on a note are fine, as are differing numbers of syllables, say in a translation of French to Polish --

<note>
  <verse n="1" xml:lang="fre">
    <syl>mot</syl>
  </verse>
  <verse n="2" xml:lang="pol">
    <syl>sło</syl>
    <syl>wo</syl>
  </verse>
</note>

MEI has no character encoding issues, since it uses Unicode.  Note the "funny" l (el) in the Polish word above.

Right-to-left alphabets present no problem for MEI as long as the words are broken into syllables (which read RTL) that are arranged from left to right; that is, associated with the note to which they belong.  The presentation of the music notation from right to left is outside the scope of MEI, but then actually so is all presentation.  :-)

--
p.