The design and implementation of Neuma, a collaborative Digital Scores Library

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of the Neuma platform, a digital library devoted to the preservation and dissemination of symbolic music content (scores). Neuma is open to musicologists, musicians, and music publishers. It consists of a repository dedicated to the storage of large collections of digital scores, where users/applications can upload their documents. It also proposes services to publish, annotate, query, transform, and analyze scores. The long-term goal of the project is to enable an open and collaborative space where musician communities will be able to share music in symbolic notation. The project is organized around the French IRPMF institute (BnF–CNRS) which chooses and produces collections (or corpora), collects and organizes user requirements, and validates new publications. We describe the architecture of Neuma and develop some of its salient features: score modeling annotations, search and transformation language, collaborative and community tools, and digital rights preservation. We illustrate these features with two collections published by Neuma, and discuss the impact of such on-line score collections from a musicological perspective.