Music Encoding Research Articles

MerMEId: Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data by The National Library, Danish Centre for Music Publication (review)

Reviewed by: MerMEId: Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data by The National Library, Danish Centre for Music Publication Adam Crandell MerMEId: Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data [Copenhagen, Denmark]: The National Library, Danish Centre for Music Publication, 2013–. http://www.kb.dk/en/nb/dcm/projekter/mermeid.html (Accessed 15 August 2014). [End-user access requires a Web browser (Internet Explorer 8+, Firefox 18.0+, or Google Chrome 24.0+ recommended) and Internet access. Pricing: Freely distributed open-source software released under Apache License version 2.0.] Introduction In order to fully understand the purpose and utility of MerMEId, one needs to first understand the Music Encoding Initiative—or MEI—a standard upon which the tool was developed. Perry Roland, at the University of Virginia, began work on MEI in 1999 as a music-specific XML schema.1 XML schemas define the content and structure of XML data used in a particular XML document, and MEI was created specifically for music XML data and metadata. The user-base for MEI has grown steadily over the years, with the latest version of the schema being released in 2013. MEI is unique from other XML-encoded music notation schemas, and one chief difference is that MEI strives to not only fully represent music data (i.e., music notation), but it also provides an apparatus for robustly encoding a range of associated metadata. For example, if the encoding were a representation of a manuscript, the MEI metadata could conceivably include individually encoded information about the creator, extent, provenance, holding archive or institution, extant copies, and so on. Unfortunately, encoding XML, and by extension MEI, requires significant precision and expertise, so the challenge arises: How can one employ the full possibilities of MEI without needing to “touch” the XML directly? Enter MerMEId MerMEId (Metadata Editor and Repository for MEI Data) consists of an XML database that stores MEI-formed data and a Web browser-based interface that facilitates metadata editing. Under the aegis of the National Library of Denmark’s Danish Centre for Music Publication, the system was developed by Axel Teich Geertinger and Sigfrid Lundberg to aid in preparing a thematic catalog of the works of Carl Nielsen, a project which is encoded following the MEI schema.2 Interface MerMEId has two interfaces: a Java application for uploading pre-existing MEI files and a Web-browser application for creating and editing MEI metadata. It would be ideal to have these two functions—uploading and creating/editing—combined into the Web application. Since the Java application is straightforward and actually part of another open-source software package, review of the interface will focus on the web application. The Web application landing page (called the File List) presents the user with a listing of all the musical works contained in the shared MEI database and with the opportunity to create a new MEI metadata file.3 Here the user can search by keyword, [End Page 543] limit by publication status and/or collection, and sort by composer, year, or work number. Each line in the File List represents a musical work, and for each work a composer, title, and user-defined collection is displayed, when applicable. Clicking on an individual title in the listing will display, in HTML, the MEI metadata for that item. The range of metadata possibilities will be covered later as the editing interface is examined. This functionality is perhaps not as intuitive as it might be, and the mouseover tooltip simply says “View”, where “View Metadata” might be clearer. Next to each work in the File List is a series of hyper-linked icons that: displays the raw XML (both the data and metadata); opens the metadata editing interface; creates a copy of the file; publishes the file to a publicly accessible folder; and deletes the file. The aforementioned actions are predictable, with the possible exception of “publishing”—until the user reads the help documentation, it is not immediately evident what the publishing functionality entails. The power of MerMEId lies in its metadata creation/editing interface. When in the interface, six tabs line the top of the page: Work, Music, Sources, History, Bibliography, and File. Selecting a tab brings...

Encoding medieval music notation for research

In 1984, John Stinson and Brian Parish developed Scribe, a computer program to encode every meaningful mark on each page of a medieval music manuscript and produce an on-screen representation of these data in both medieval and modern notation. Scribe data have proved essential for creating statistical and comparative analyses, compositional analyses and producing online thematic indices for the Medieval Music Database over a large body of music. Even though the Scribe still functions in cross-platform DOS-emulated computer environments, the growth of Digital Humanities, linked open data and enormous potential for online research collaboration offers a series of opportunities for encoded medieval music notation data. This report details the authors’ efforts since 2013 in converting Scribe’s data into open access data based upon the standard being developed by the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI). When coupled with recent developments in the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) project, our new Scribe-based module, known as NeoScribe, offers significant enhancements to the MEI standard that stand to benefit current and future developments in digital musicology.

Early music and the Music Encoding Initiative

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a collaborative, open-source project focused on building a comprehensive framework for the creation of electronic formats that support encoding of symbolic music notation and other associated data and metadata. The MEI community strives to create scholarly standards for digital musical analysis, criticism and editorial work similar to those available for textual material. The community includes practitioners from a diverse range of related disciplines including musicology, music theory, music librarianship and music technology, each contributing to ongoing discussions and tools for building digital critical music editions. This article provides an introduction to music encoding and MEI in the context of early music.

Music as a memory enhancer: Differences between healthy older adults and patients with Alzheimer's disease.

Simmons-Stern, Budson, and Ally (2010) were the first to demonstrate that visually presented song lyrics were better remembered by patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) when accompanied by those lyrics sung rather than spoken at encoding. Surprisingly, healthy older adults showed no benefit of these musical mnemonics. Healthy older adults performed significantly better in both the sung and spoken conditions than the patients with AD. Perhaps, whenever discrimination is sufficiently high, musical mnemonics do not further aid performance. To test this possibility, we introduced a 1-week delay between study and test in a paradigm otherwise identical to the one used by Simmons-Stern et al. We successfully matched the overall discrimination performance of healthy older adults to the levels of the patients with AD in the original study but still did not find a benefit of musical mnemonics. The results of this study suggest that there may be a fundamental difference in musical encoding between patients with AD—whose memory is enhanced by musical encoding—and healthy older adults—whose memory is not—even when the two groups are matched for overall performance.

Music-based memory enhancement in Alzheimer's Disease: Promise and limitations

In a previous study (Simmons-Stern, Budson & Ally, 2010), we found that patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) better recognized visually presented lyrics when the lyrics were also sung rather than spoken at encoding. The present study sought to further investigate the effects of music on memory in patients with AD by making the content of the song lyrics relevant for the daily life of an older adult and by examining how musical encoding alters several different aspects of episodic memory. Patients with AD and healthy older adults studied visually presented novel song lyrics related to instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) that were accompanied by either a sung or a spoken recording. Overall, participants performed better on a memory test of general lyric content for lyrics that were studied sung as compared to spoken. However, on a memory test of specific lyric content, participants performed equally well for sung and spoken lyrics. We interpret these results in terms of a dual-process model of recognition memory such that the general content questions represent a familiarity-based representation that is preferentially sensitive to enhancement via music, while the specific content questions represent a recollection-based representation unaided by musical encoding. Additionally, in a test of basic recognition memory for the audio stimuli, patients with AD demonstrated equal discrimination for sung and spoken stimuli. We propose that the perceptual distinctiveness of musical stimuli enhanced metamemorial awareness in AD patients via a non-selective distinctiveness heuristic, thereby reducing false recognition while at the same time reducing true recognition and eliminating the mnemonic benefit of music. These results are discussed in the context of potential music-based memory enhancement interventions for the care of patients with AD.

IEEE 1599: Music Encoding and Interaction

IEEE Std 1599 allows interaction with music content such as notes and sounds in video applications and in any interactive device.

“An Idea Can Never Perish”: Memory, the Musical Idea, and Schoenberg's A Survivor From Warsaw (1947)

This article explores the role of memory within Schoenberg's Gedanke Manuscripts and its musical encoding in A Survivor From Warsaw, his 1947 Holocaust cantata. In the Gedanke Manuscripts human memory serves as analogy for the connective processes that aid the listener in comprehending and identifying the musical idea. Schoenberg argues that a musical idea is recognized (erkennt), retained, and then re-recognized (wiedererkennt) by the listener in a process similar to that of memory. These comments form the basis for an analysis that demonstrates the patterning of Survivor's 12-tone rows according to such mnemonic principles. The encoding of memory in the narrator's testimony as well as in the musical structure suggests that memory functions as an overriding poetic idea that holds several implications for evaluations of the cantata's musical and religious significance within Schoenberg's corpus.

Episodic Encoding in Normal Aging: Attentional Resources Hypothesis Extended to Musical Material

ABSTRACT The goal of the present study was to examine age-related changes in musical episodic memory for novel tunes. This was conducted by manipulating the encoding condition in a recognition paradigm. After receiving memory instructions (intentional condition), older and younger participants obtained equivalent hits. In contrast, when intentional encoding was accompanied by a dancing judgment (dancing + intentional condition), the recognition performance of the older persons was severely impaired. Impaired recognition was also found when participants only judged the excerpts without being instructed to memorize them (dancing judgment condition). Although older participants demonstrated a preserved ability to perform the dancing judgment on its own, this ability was not optimal and likely precluded the initiation of more elaborate encoding strategies. These results suggest that asking older persons to divide their attention in the study phase reduces the quality of their musical encoding. Given this extension to musical material, we discuss the notion that the age-related attentional resource decline appears to be domain-general rather than specific to verbal material.

Steady-state visually evoked potential (SSVEP) responses correlate with musically trained participants' encoding and retention phases of musical working memory task performance

This study investigated cortical responses to aspects of musical cognition associated with musically trained participants' performance in a musical working memory task. Steady-state visually evoked potentials (SSVEP) were recorded from 64 scalp sites of 20 musically trained females while they performed two auditory tasks. A probe-recognition task required participants to detect changes in pitch to a recently presented 10-note pitch pattern. Individual particpant's scores in the probe task were correlated with SSVEP latency responses averaged separately over encoding and retention phases of the task. Significant negative correlations were found between participant performance and SSVEP latency over left temporal electrodes during the encoding and retention phase and over left frontal electrodes during the retention phase. It is proposed that cognitive strategies implemented by higher performing participants elicited greater involvement of local left temporal and left frontal cortical networks in conjunction with music encoding and retention processes.

Computing in musicology, 1966?91

While there are many parallels between computing activities in musicology and those in other humanities disciplines, the particular nature of musical material and the ways in which this must be accommodated set many activities apart from those in text-based disciplines. As in other disciplines, early applications were beset by hardware constraints, which placed a premium on expertise and promoted design-intensive projects. Massive musical encoding and bibliographical projects were initiated. Diversification of hardware platforms and languages in the Seventies led to task-specific undertakings, including preliminary work on many of today's programs for music printing and analysis. The rise of personal computers and associated general-purpose software in the Eighties has enabled many scholars to pursue projects individually, particularly with the assistance of database, word processing, and notation software. Current issues facing the field include the need for standards for data interchange, the creation of banks of reusable data, the establishment of qualitative standards for encoded data, and the encouragement of realistic appraisals of what computers can do. The musicologist Eleanor Selfridge-Field, who is the author of three books on Italian music and numerous articles, editions, and reviews, has worked at CCARH since its founding in 1984. Her most recent book, The Music of Benedetto and Alessandro Marcello (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), which contains 1300 musical examples, was produced from camera-ready copy supplied by CCARH. Drs. Hewlett and Selfridge-Field jointly edit the series Computing in Musicology, which is published by CCARH, and co-chair the International Musicological Society's Study Group on Musical Data and Computer Applications.

Modulation circuitry for use in a music encoding system

First Page

Music encoding and decoding apparatus

Music encoding and decoding apparatus which divides a keyboard instrument into groupings of designated lengths such as octaves wherein each octave is scanned, either in sequence or on triggering of a key in that octave; the apparatus includes a master encoder which encodes a key closure, the encoding being in the form of a word of multiple bits having a specified word length. The apparatus further encodes the expression of the note. The expression constitutes a portion of the word. Decoding apparatus is likewise incorporated. It reverses the sequence and drives a solenoid for operation of a keyboard instrument.