Digital Musicology

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven, open-source effort to define a system for encoding musical documents in a machine-readable structure. MEI brings together specialists from various music research communities, including technologists, librarians, historians, and theorists in a common effort to define best practices for representing a broad range of musical documents and structures. The results of these discussions are formalized in the MEI schema, a core set of rules for recording physical and intellectual characteristics of music notation documents expressed as an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) schema. It is complemented by the MEI Guidelines, which provide detailed explanations of the components of the MEI model and best practices suggestions

musicinformationretrieval.com is a collection of instructional materials for music information retrieval (MIR). These materials contain a mix of casual conversation, technical discussion, and Python code.

Optical Music Recognition (OMR) is the process of converting scanned images of pages of music into computer readable and manipulable symbols. We focus on creating music recognition tools for libraries, archives and musicologists, and specialize in working with early music notation.

The Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis project (SIMSSA) is teaching computers to recognize the musical symbols in digital images of musical scores, linking materials from the shelves of libraries and museums from around the world in a single digital forum.

SALAMI is an innovative and ambitious computational musicology project. To date, musical analysis has been conducted by individuals and on a small scale. Our computational approach, combined with the huge volume of data now available from such source as the Internet Archive, will: a) deliver a very substantive corpus of musical analyses in a common framework for use by music scholars, students and beyond; and, b) establish a methodology and tooling which will enable others to add to this in the future and to broaden the application of the techniques we establish. A resource of SALAMI’s magnitude empowers musicologists to approach their work in a new and different way, starting with the data, and to ask research questions that have not been possible before.

Music21 is a set of tools for helping scholars and other active listeners answer questions about music quickly and simply. If you’ve ever asked yourself a question like, “I wonder how often Bach does that” or “I wish I knew which band was the first to use these chords in this order,” or “I’ll bet we’d know more about Renaissance counterpoint (or Indian ragas or post-tonal pitch structures or the form of minuets) if I could write a program to automatically write more of them,” then music21 can help you with your work.

This project is to design and develop a historical document analysis system as a computer assistant for musicologists and historians to help them in their work in studying early western musical manuscripts. The guiding premise is to construct a system that experts in the field of musicology can use to study the subject documents and explore research hypotheses without requiring advanced computer science expertise. For this reason, features and interfaces of the system are being designed in close cooperation between computer scientists and research musicologists.

Unlike text databases, online content-searchable databases of music scores are extremely rare. The main reasons are the cost of digitisation, the inaccessibility of original music scores and manuscripts, and the lack of sophisticated music recognition software. The proposed research will attempt to circumvent these problems by investigating the feasibility of using existing microfilms for digitisation.

Equipped with Schubert and Cumming's “contrpuntal modules”, Myke Cuthbert's music21 library for Python, the Perl/Humdrum software collection, and a growing set of online repositories of symbolic musical data, the ELVIS team has set out to bring an empirical basis to music theoretic conjecturing about counterpoint.

Verovio Humdrum Viewer is an online digital music editor and interactive notation rendering interface for Humdrum files.