Measuring Polyphony: An Online Music Editor for Late Medieval Polyphony

FAIN: HAA-263800-19

Brandeis University (Waltham, MA 02453-2728)
Karen Desmond (Project Director: June 2018 to September 2024)

The development of a prototype of an online music editor to help scholars and students analyze medieval music manuscripts. The project would also convene a workshop for medieval studies scholars, musicologists, and technical specialists to evaluate the prototype.

The development of an online music editor will allow a variety of modern readers (students and experts, musicologists, music theorists, those interested in the history of music notation, counterpoint, medieval palaeography and/or manuscript studies) to access and contribute transcriptions of music directly linked to digital images of the medieval manuscripts, and to learn about the original notation. A two-day workshop will bring together the leading experts in music encoding and medieval musicology to evaluate the prototype editor and to devise plans for its further development and rollout. This tool will offer new possibilities for the analysis and interpretation of late medieval music. In a broader humanities context, the project investigates how modeling the meanings of notational signs can lead to new understandings of the interaction between the sign and the signified, and of the relationship between notational style and changes in musical style across time and place.

Associated Products

Online Mensural Music Editor (Computer Program)
Title: Online Mensural Music Editor
Author: Karen Desmond
Author: Juliette Regimbal
Author: Martha Thomae
Author: Craig Sapp
Author: Andrew Hankinson
Author: Laurent Pugin
Abstract: The online mensural music editor allows a variety of users (students and experts, musicologists, music theorists, palaeographers, musicians, singers, etc.) to both access and contribute transcriptions of medieval polyphonic music directly linked to images of the medieval manuscripts. It allows users with no expertise in music encoding to encode large amounts of music data in mensural notation following the community based open-access standards of the Music Encoding Initiative, thereby increasing medieval music repertoires available for study, performance, and analysis.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: http://editor.measuringpolyphony.org
Secondary URL: https://github.com/MeasuringPolyphony/mp_editor
Secondary URL Description: This is the source code in Github (open source)
Access Model: Open access
Programming Language/Platform: Javascript
Source Available?: Yes

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