Optical music recognition and manuscript chant sources

Abstract

The increasing variety of digital tools available for medieval musicology research includes the new project Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) at McGill University. Currently under development, SIMSSA has begun scanning medieval chant manuscripts and applying optical music recognition (OMR) software to search for musical content. Once thought to be nearly impossible owing to the complexity and stylistic variety of handwritten chant notation (neumes), SIMSSA’s initial ventures have demonstrated that despite the hundreds of different types of medieval signs and the unique characteristics of scribes across medieval Europe, the musical, textual and liturgical content on manuscript pages can be isolated and identified. Manual entry of chant texts and melodies, which is routinely followed by a thorough review, will be supplanted by automated entry, ready for human proofreading. Hours of research time spent collecting data will be saved, and musicologists will be able to move towards analysis of the information much more quickly. With a potentially very large amount of digitized chant data extracted with reduced time and effort, the scope of computer applications for analysis and comparison is considerable. Thriving on the wealth of online digital image libraries, where high-quality photographs of thousands of pages of medieval books are freely available, SIMSSA will not only complement the digital tools currently available to medieval chant researchers, but will bring their varied interests together in a unified online research environment.