Music Encoding Research Articles

Data structures for music encoding: tables, trees, and graphs

One of the challenges in planning a digital edition is the selection of the encoding system and representation format that the edition will use to encode musical information. This decision affects the form of the edition not only through the descriptive capabilities of the encoding format, but also through the format's adherence to certain data structures such as tables, trees, and graphs. Far from being straightforward containers, each of these structures possess unique qualities that constrain the encoding process into considering the music within the parameters of that data model. Data that does not fit must be cajoled into the chosen model, with varying degrees of success. Recent work has developed arguments for the use of certain formats in specific cases based on features and interoperability, but a thorough review of the suitability and sustainability of the underlying data structures has yet to be conducted. This paper explores the problem of music representation in data structures from the perspective of musical domain. By encoding the same passages of music in multiple hypothetical formats it demonstrates the musical aspects and, particularly, the relationships that the data structures commonly used in music encoding variously excel at, privilege, or struggle with representing. I argue that encoding projects should consider the constraints that the data structures of a format impose on their encoding; whether there are instances that would be unsatisfactorily modelled, the data biases this creates, and therefore whether it would be advisable to extend the representation format to accommodate another data structure.

Toward a community model of scholarly editing: FAIR/CARE, research ethics, & labour visibility

Historically, scholarly editions of music have identified a managing editor and individual volume editors. Other contributors might receive an acknowledgement with a vague description of activities, with institutional support often appearing in the printed metadata. This model’s emphasis on single scholars perpetuates a myth, relying heretofore upon predominantly invisible labour. Digital editions require interdisciplinary collaboration combining musicological skills, technical skills, and infrastructural resources, thus challenging this model’s ability to endure. Moreover, digital editions proffer opportunities for reconsidering the roles, workflows, and knowledge structures involved in critical musical scholarship. Situated at the intersection of currently running and recently completed digital projects, continuously emergent tools, sociology, and philosophy, this essay reflects on the role of the editor in the digital age. Beginning with Howard Becker’s art worlds model of creative communities, it suggests a model based on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and CARE (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics) principles and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). MEI affords expansive metadata recording for contributors – composers, librettists, performers, editors, researchers, funders, etc. – to a work and its embodiments, which in turn enables broader visibility and empowers greater acknowledgement of the labour involved in such projects. Alongside other digital projects, this essay pays particular attention to how these technological and team-focused concepts are at- and in-play in the Reger-Werkausgabe Online.

Letters and Musical Sketches. Toward a Proper Integration of Bellini’s Writings.

This article examines the use of XML-based technologies to encode verbal and musical texts in two publishing products featuring autograph material by Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835), held at the Museo civico Belliniano in Catania, Italy. The first product is a digital scholarly edition (DSE) of Bellini’s autograph letters, encoded using the XML-TEI vocabulary. The second project involves the encoding of Bellini’s musical sketches, which often complement the letters by providing concrete examples of his compositional techniques. An experimental approach using the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) vocabulary was adopted for these sketches: this encoding process required custom solutions to address the texts’ unique features, such as authorial interventions, the sketches’ embryonic nature, the copresence of musical notation and textual annotations, and the interrelations of different studies. This article therefore examines formal representational strategies and challenges encountered during the encoding process, particularly for musical texts, and presents an initial proposal aimed at properly integrating information from the TEI-encoded verbal texts and MEI-encoded musical texts, using an approach modeled after the Web Annotation Data Model (WADM) and its current implementation in TEI. We believe that the integration of these practices, technologies, and data is a means to unravel Bellini’s compositional process and his artistic sensibility, thereby enhancing both scholarly research and public engagement with his work.

Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for musical sequence knowledge.

Involuntary musical imagery (INMI; more commonly known as "earworms" or having a song "stuck in your head") is a common musical phenomenon and one of the most salient examples of spontaneous cognition. Despite the ubiquitous nature of INMI in the general population, functional roles of INMI remain to be fully established and characterized. Findings that spontaneous reactivation of mental representations aids in memory consolidation raise the possibility that INMI also serves in this capacity. In three experiments, we manipulated the probability of experiencing INMI for novel music loops by first exposing participants to these loops during tasks that varied in attentional and sensorimotor demands. We measured INMI for loops and the quality of individual loop memories using different tasks both immediately following exposure and at a delay of 1 week. Across experiments, reduced exposure to music had the largest effect on INMI and loop memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, music encoding was resilient to manipulations of attentional focus; however, in Experiment 3, engaging sequence learning processes with an unrelated task during music exposure reduced the subsequent accuracy of loop memories and the likelihood of experiencing INMI. In each experiment, the amount of INMI experienced for a loop across the delay period predicted improvements in the accuracy of a loop memory over time. We thus provide evidence for a memory-consolidation role for INMI, in which the spontaneous replay of recently encoded music is related to the quality of music encoding and predicts changes in music memory over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Preferred Preservation Formats for Digital Music Scores: A Survey of University Music Faculty

Digitally notated music scores are widely created and distributed. But the collaborative nature of the online environment and variety of file formats and software choices, both proprietary and open-source, present unique challenges for archivists when it comes to sharing, preserving, and providing access to these digital scores now and into the future. This article addresses the advantages and disadvantages of file formats for digital notated music scores that offer the greatest potential for long-term preservation, sustainability, and future accessibility. These formats, outlined in the Library of Congress's Recommended Formats Statement, are MusicXML, the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) schema, and PDF/UA/A. The authors conducted a survey of eighty-nine music professors at twenty-two universities to determine the extent to which they utilize these different file formats as well as digital preservation best practices in their work. All respondents who create musical scores use digital notation software. While most utilize PDF and discuss this format with their students, far fewer use MusicXML and MEI. Only 46 percent were aware of the principles of digital preservation. The article concludes with a detailed analysis of the results from this survey, which revealed ways in which information professionals can educate faculty about responsible measures that will ensure the long-term accessibility and research potential of digital music scores in an ever-changing digital world.

Roundtable: Pedagogical Approaches to Music Encoding

Roundtable: Pedagogical Approaches to Music Encoding

The Music Encoding Initiative: Facilitating Open Access for Musical Notation

The Music Encoding Initiative: Facilitating Open Access for Musical Notation

Zu einigen Aktivitäten der Digital Musicology auf dem Gebiet der Älteren Musik

This paper discusses some of the increasing activities in the field of digital musicology. The focus being on early music prior to 1600 doesn't mean that the questions and methods presented here can't be applied to other periods or to musicology in general. However, particularly early music seems to profit in a special way by the use of digital methods, especially in the fields of notation history, transmission of manuscripts and performance practice. The paper presents an overview over various projects, approaches and techniques that were developed in recent years or that are still under development. It covers the fields of music encoding and visualization, digital editing, reconstruction of manuscripts and libraries, of melodies and parts, of virtual sound spaces and historical tuning and how this will open up new horizons for research in early music history.

Digitale Musikanalyse mit den Techniken der Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) am Beispiel von Kompositionsstudien Anton Bruckners

Studying the harmonic structures of a musical work and exploring its origins is one of the main tasks of traditional musicology. Since the advent of computer technologies, new tools for musical analysis emerged to gain new perspectives on well-known compositions. In the field of digital musical editions, the markup language MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) plays a prominent role for encoding musical notation with a musicological demand. This paper presents the current state of the project "Digital Music Analysis with MEI using the Example of Anton Bruckner's Compositional Studies". Its aim is to encode the "Kitzler Study book" written by Bruckner and to present it in a digital Edition. Also, the project explores the capability of MEI for an automatic or half-automatic harmonic analysis.

Using Note-Level Music Encodings to Facilitate Interdisciplinary Research on Human Engagement with Music

Music encoding can link disparate types of musical data for the purposes of archiving and search. The encoding of human response data explicitly in relation to musical notes facilitates the study of the ways humans engage with music as performers and listeners. This paper reflects on the developments and trends in formal music encoding systems as well as the types of data representations used in corpora released by researchers working on expert music analyses, musical performances, and listener responses. It argues that while the specificity (and often simplicity) afforded by project-specific encoding formats may be useful for individual research projects, larger-scale interdisciplinary research would be better served by explicit, formalized linking of data to specific musical elements. The paper concludes by offering some concrete suggestions for how to achieve this goal.

A TEI Customization for Writing TEI Customizations

A schema, in general, is intended to be used to check a document for errors before those errors cause problems in processing. However, schemas can also help us write our documents. The TEI ODD language (and the more modern version thereof, Pure ODD), in particular, can be used for two related but distinctly different purposes: 1) to create a markup language, including documentation and schemas; and 2) to customize a markup language that was already written in ODD. There are several examples of (1), including the TEI Guidelines, the Music Encoding Initiative, the ISO Feature Structure encoding system, and the W3C Internationalization Tag Set. And there are several well known examples of (2), including TEI Lite, TEI Tite, TEI Simple Print, Comic Book Markup Language, Digital Humanities Quarterly, TEI-in-Libraries, and the markup language for this journal. Of all these various uses of the TEI ODD language, the most common (by far) is to create a customized TEI for use in a particular project. This is because the TEI Guidelines are not meant to be used out of the box—every TEI project is expected to customize the TEI. For example, in raw (i.e., uncustomized) TEI, the @type attribute of has a robust set of nine suggested values: business, delivery, entrance, exit, location, mixed, mixed, novelistic, and setting. But a project may very well wish to expand this list (e.g., by adding onStage, prop, remains) and require that encoders use a value from this expanded list. This sort of molding of the TEI to local purposes is done by creating a TEI customization using the TEI ODD language. In this paper I will present a TEI ODD customization of the TEI language that is intended to help a user write a TEI ODD customization of the TEI language. It is not intended to check a TEI ODD customization document for errors, and in fact will likely flag things as “errors” that an ODD processor would find perfectly acceptable. But it does allow a user to more quickly, easily, and accurately write a TEI customization ODD using an XML editor.

Preservation of Musical Memory Throughout the Progression of Alzheimer's Disease? Toward a Reconciliation of Theoretical, Clinical, and Neuroimaging Evidence.

Through this review of 25 clinical and experimental works on long-term musical memories in Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients, we attempt to clarify the conceptual understanding of musical memories, identify their evolution across the stages of the pathology, and propose possible explanations concerning the neural and cognitive mechanisms that underpin the preservation and impairment of certain musical memories. After clarifying the different kind of musical memories, we investigated their alterations throughout AD's progression from mild to severe stages. Both procedural and retrograde semantic memory seem relatively spared in AD, while episodic memory appears to be impaired early. Moreover, partial preservation of music encoding in AD can be revealed through paradigms that are especially designed for AD patients (relying on behavioral cues, using adapted settings, etc.). Although seldomly used, they would definitely help understanding the preserved capacities in every stage of AD. However, more research is needed to better understand this phenomenon and assess its specificity to music or other types of supports. These findings could lead to multiple applications in care settings and research designs, bringing more nuanced understanding of how long-term musical memory degrades throughout the course of AD, and should encourage us to prioritize patients' preserved cognitive abilities in current AD recreational and care programs.

White Mensural Manual Encoding: from Humdrum to MEI

<p><span lang="EN-US">The recovery of musical heritage currently necessarily involves its digitalization, not only by scanning images, but also by the encoding in computer-readable formats of the musical content described in the original manuscripts. In general, this encoding can be done using automated tools based with what is named Optical Music Recognition (OMR), or manually writing directly the corresponding computer code. The OMR technology is not mature enough yet to extract the musical content of sheet music images with enough quality, and even less from handwritten sources, so in many cases it is more efficient to encode the works manually. However, being currently MEI (Music Encoding Initiative) the most appropriate format to store the encoding, it is a totally tedious code to be manually written. Therefore, we propose a new format named **mens allowing a quick manual encoding, from which both the MEI format itself and other common representations such as Lilypond or the transcription in MusicXML can be generated. By using this approach, the antiphony Salve Regina for eight-voice choir written by Jerónimo de la Torre (1607–1673) has been successfully encoded and transcribed.</span></p>

An MEI-based standard encoding for hierarchical music analyses

We propose a standard representation for hierarchical musical analyses as an extension to the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) representation for music. Analyses of music need to be represented in digital form for the same reasons as music: preservation, sharing of data, data linking, and digital processing. Systems exist for representing sequential information, but many music analyses are hierarchical, whether represented explicitly in trees or graphs or not. Features of MEI allow the representation of an analysis to be directly associated with the elements of the music analyzed. MEI’s basis in TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), allows us to design a scheme which reuses some of the elements of TEI for the representation of trees and graphs. In order to capture both the information specific to a type of music analysis and the underlying form of an analysis as a tree or graph, we propose related “semantic” encodings, which capture the detailed information, and generic “non-semantic” encodings which expose the tree or graph structure. We illustrate this with examples of representations of a range of different kinds of analysis.

Is music a memory booster in normal aging? The influence of emotion

ABSTRACTAge-related differences in episodic memory have been explained by a decrement in strategic encoding implementation. It has been shown in clinical populations that music can be used during the encoding stage as a mnemonic strategy to learn verbal information. The effectiveness of this strategy remains equivocal in older adults (OA). Furthermore, the impact of the emotional valence of the music used has never been investigated in this context. Thirty OA and 24 young adults (YA) learned texts that were either set to music that was positively or negatively valenced, or spoken only. Immediate and delayed recalls were measured. Results showed that: (i) OA perform worse than YA in immediate and delayed recall; (ii) sung lyrics are better remembered than spoken ones in OA, but only when the associated music is positively-valenced; (iii) this pattern is observed regardless the retention delay. These findings support the benefit of a musical encoding on verbal learning in healthy OA and are consistent with the positivity effect classically reported in normal aging. Added to the potential applications in daily life, the results are discussed with respect to the theoretical hypotheses of the mechanisms underlying the advantage of musical encoding.

Encoding music performance data in Humdrum and MEI

This paper proposes extensions to two existing music encoding formats, Humdrum and Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), in order to facilitate linking music performance data with corresponding score information. We began by surveying music scholars about their needs for encoding timing, loudness, pitch, and timbral performance data. We used the results of this survey to design and implement new spines in Humdrum syntax to encode summary descriptors at note, beat, and measure levels and new attributes in the MEI format to encode both note-wise summaries and continuous data. These extensions allow for multiple performances of the same piece to be directly compared with one another, facilitating both humanistic and computational study of recorded musical performances.

Challenges for Annotation Concepts in Music

Traditional historico-critical music editions provide scholars and musicians with an edited score based on the interpretation of various sources such as the composer's autograph(s), letters and other materials from copyists or publishers. Their digital counterparts have the potential to offer new and more expanded ways to explore the work. This is based on the possibility to provide large amounts of source materials and to annotate more extensively (since printing costs are irrelevant). Furthermore, audio and video recordings of performances can be integrated. But, similarly important, the user interface makes it much easier to navigate in the complex network of cross-references between various source materials and the editor's annotations. The XML-based Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format is the standard music representation format for digital music editions. In this article we discuss current MEI-based annotation practices and outline the current challenges for music annotations, including a discussion of anchoring options, the embedding of addressable elements in the local musical context, the annotation of audio, and the categorisation of annotations. This leads to a discussion of open questions such as the ability to secure authorship in open and reusable editions.

Show me a strathspey: taking steps to digitize tune collections

Purpose The present paper describes an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) research project into Scottish fiddle music and the important considerations of music digitization, access and discovery in designing the website that will be one of the project’s enduring outcomes. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a general review of existing online indices to music repertoires and some of the general problems associated with selecting metadata and indexing such material and is a survey of the various recent and contemporary projects into the digital encoding of musical notation for online use. Findings The questions addressed during the design of the Bass Culture project database serve to highlight the importance of cooperation between musicologists, information specialists and computer scientists, and the benefits of having researchers with strengths in more than one of these disciplines. The Music Encoding Initiative proves an effective means of providing digital access to the Scottish fiddle tune repertoire. Originality/value The digital encoding of music notation is still comparatively cutting-edge; the Bass Culture project is thus a useful exemplar for interdisciplinary collaboration between musicologists, information specialists and computer scientists, and it addresses issues which are likely to be applicable to future projects of this nature.

Review: Music Encoding Initiative

Music Encoding Initiative. Johannes Kepper, Administrative Chair. URL: http://music-encoding.org/ It will not have escaped the notice of many readers of this Journal that a number of ambitious projects in historical musicology with a major IT component have received generous grant funding in recent years. Underpinning each of these projects is the music-encoding standard known as the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). Examples include a pair of projects primarily devoted to opera. Freischutz Digital is an online critical edition involving all the significant textual and musical sources of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz (first performed in 1821),1 and forming part of a projected complete online Weber edition.2 With its bewildering variety of versions, translations, and adaptations, it proves a severe test for the notion of a definitive and fixed operatic “work concept.” Similar complexities plague the online critical editions of three operas by Giuseppe Sarti (1729–1802),3 which form the centerpiece of a musicological project dealing with a less familiar, and possibly unreasonably neglected, historical figure. In contrast to these opera editions, which use data from several different documents as the basis for an online edition of …

Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century by Bryan Proksch

Reviewed by: Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century by Bryan Proksch Balázs Mikusi Reviving Haydn: New Appreciations in the Twentieth Century. By Bryan Proksch. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 124.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015. [viii, 292 p. ISBN 9781580465120. $85.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, appendix, bibliography, indexes. When talking to scholars from older generations, one often hears comments about the astonishing turnaround that the reception of Joseph Haydn’s music underwent in their lifetime, i.e., the second part of the twentieth century. Viewed in a larger context, however, this rise of Haydn’s fame seems but an aftershock of an even more decisive turnaround that took place sometime in the first half of the century. Bryan Proksch has set out to examine the roots of this consequential change, and describes the gradual emancipation of Haydn—his becoming an equal of Mozart and Beethoven—as a multifaceted process, one that was too gradual to be dated with any precision, did not emanate from one geographic center (let alone a single musician or scholar), and was diagnosed even by those who contributed to it only post facto, once the “new appreciations” (of the book’s title) had more or less become general currency. In our days such a non-authoritarian conclusion may seem trendy, perhaps suspiciously so, but the book convincingly argues that the metamorphosis of Haydn’s reception has indeed exemplified this kind of multifocal process, the motivations behind which can at best be hinted at rather than scrupulously documented in a positivist manner. Out of the book’s nine chapters, the first two seek to reconstruct the nineteenth-century context from which the twentieth century gradually deviated. Proksch sensitively outlines the progression in which Haydn came increasingly to be viewed as a mere stepping-stone toward Ludwig van Beethoven—an interpretation that inevitably stood in the way of an appreciation of his works on their own terms, even in a period when the audience still maintained a sincere and spontaneous interest in Haydn’s music. The means through which the composer’s aesthetic anachronism could be demonstrated were manifold—the construction of a “Haydn style” of performance (Hans von Bülow) or a “Haydn era” of music history (Eduard Hanslick) (p. 38) inevitably created a kind of quarantine, which seemingly assured Haydn’s special position but at the same time sidelined him as irrelevant. With chapter 3, the book enters the twentieth century and sets out on a journey, each station of which focuses on a certain geographic locale and a few well-known figures whose views about Haydn’s music seemed more (for lack of a better word) “realistic” than those of most of their contemporaries. First there is a detailed account of Jules Écorcheville’s famous 1909 commission that resulted in half a dozen works written on the theme B–A–D–D–G (a somewhat odd musical encoding of the letters of the name Haydn); Camille Saint-Saëns, the “Neoclassicist infused with Haydn,” is discussed in particular detail (p. 77). Chapter 4 also examines the French scene, gathering evidence of Haydn’s presence in Vincent d’Indy’s scholarship and analyses as well as in the work of his students. [End Page 86] The following two chapters are dedicated to two major figures who valued Haydn for his role in establishing an Austro-German tradition. Heinrich Schenker’s diverse approaches to the composer are explored in a detailed manner, and the close dependence of his ostensibly “objective” analyses on the changing political climate and Schenker’s life conditions is demonstrated most persuasively. The discussion of Arnold Schoenberg’s views on Haydn (in chapter 6) in part relies on unpublished sources, and skillfully demonstrates how Schoenberg used Haydn’s example to promote his own compositional practice—a topic that recurs in several other case studies of the volume. Chapter 7 would at first sight seem an “aside,” but Proksch’s drawing on diverse primary sources allows for precious insights into the American musical scene that are not merely of local interest. The final pair of chapters (nos. 8 and 9) focuses on the “Anglophone Haydn,” which—paradoxically—at first proved...