Enhancing Music Notation Addressability

FAIN: HD-51836-14

University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD 20742-5141)
Raffaele Viglianti (Project Director: September 2013 to May 2016)

The development of software tools that would facilitate citation and annotation of music notation and capture information about multiple participants' contributions to collaborative digital projects. As an initial case study, the project would focus on an existing effort to compile a critical edition of Nicolas Du Chemin's Chansons Nouvelles.

The Enhancing Music Notation Addressability project seeks a Level II DH Startup Grant for developing software to address and extract music notation expressed in the Music Encoding Initiative format. Because addressing music notation segments is central to musicological discourse, we seek to answer such questions as (1) how can one virtually 'circle' music notation? and (2) how can a machine interpret this 'circling' to retrieve music notation? We intend to evaluate our approach by transforming into nanopublications the analytical music annotations already produced by students and scholars as part of the Du Chemin: Lost Voices project, which is reconstructing songs from 16th c. France. Nanopublication is providing the scientific community with a way of outlining attribution and quality of even small contributions to facilitate citation and promote massive collaborative scholarship. We seek to extend its benefits to humanities scholarship.

Associated Products

Music Notation Addressability (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Music Notation Addressability
Author: Raffaele Viglianti
Abstract: Addressing music notation segments is central to many kinds of musicological discourse; references vary in scope and precision, such as "the measures two and three" or a more generic "the timpani in the opening bars of the Overture". Prompted the growing number of digitized music scores, this paper seeks to answer such questions as (1) how can one virtually ‘circle’ music notation? and (2) how can a machine interpret this ‘circling’ to retrieve music notation? The paper introduced the EMA project goals.
Date: 05/22/2014
Primary URL: http://music-encoding.org/archive/schedule2014
Primary URL Description: Conference schedule
Conference Name: Music Encoding Conference

Music Addressability API (Blog Post)
Title: Music Addressability API
Author: Raffaele Viglianti
Abstract: Blog post reporting on EMA project progress
Date: 11/24/2014
Primary URL: http://mith.umd.edu/music-addressability-api/
Primary URL Description: Blog post URL.
Blog Title: Music Addressability API
Website: MITH blog

A specification for addressing encoded music on the web (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: A specification for addressing encoded music on the web
Author: Raffaele Viglianti
Abstract: Enhancing Music Notation Addressability is a one-year project that investigates methods for addressing arbitrary portions of encoded music notation on the web. By “addressing” we mean being able to refer to, or cite, a passage of music in order to make a statement about it. This could be considered a virtual equivalent of “circling” some music notation on a printed score. Michael Witmore (2010) has argued that text is a “massively addressable object”; that is, given certain abstractions and conventions, it is possible to identify areas of a text such as characters, words, as well as chapters or proper names. Compared to text, music notation is more complicated to represent digitally. Human-computer interaction has since its early days been built around the concept of character and line, which makes dealing with “plain” text a fairly straightforward matter for many basic operations; counting the number of characters in a given plain text document is trivial in any digital environment. Music notation, however, requires substantial computational modeling even for the simplest musical text before any further operation is possible. There are, indeed, many ways of representing a single note; some aspects are common to all representation systems, such as information about pitch and duration, but some systems will prioritize certain aspects over others. This poster will show the technical specification created by the EMA project. The specification aims at defining a scheme for addressing a selection of music notation regardless of its representation. The expression is based on simple units that are commonly represented by music notation systems for common western music notation, such as measure, staff, and beat. The expression is formulated as a URL, which makes it possible to target resources on the web.
Date: 05/19/2015
Primary URL: http://music-encoding.org/community/conference/program/
Primary URL Description: Conference program

Hands-on software development for MEI (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Hands-on software development for MEI
Author: Andrew Hankinson
Author: Raffaele Viglianti
Abstract: This was a full day workshop organized by Andrew Hankinson. One of the 1.5hrs sessions was assigned to Raffaele Viglianti to demonstrate and teach the API produced as part of the Enhancing Music Notation Addressability project.
Date: 05/18/2015
Primary URL: http://music-encoding.org/community/conference/program/
Primary URL Description: Conference website

The Music Addressability API: A draft specification for addressing portions of music notation on the web (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: The Music Addressability API: A draft specification for addressing portions of music notation on the web
Author: Raffaele Viglianti
Abstract: This paper describes an Application Programming Interface (API) for addressing music notation on the web regardless of the format in which it is stored. This API was created as a method for addressing and extracting specific portions of music notation published in machine-readable formats on the web. Music notation, like text, can be “addressed” in new ways in a digital environment, allowing scholars to identify and name structures of various kinds, thus raising such questions as how can one virtually “circle” some music notation? How can a machine interpret this “circling” to select and retrieve the relevant music notation? The API was evaluated by: 1) creating an implementation of the API for documents in the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format; and by 2) remodelling a dataset of music analysis statements from the Du Chemin: Lost Voices project (Haverford College) by using the API to connect the analytical statements with the portion of notaiton they refer to. Building this corpus has demonstrated that the Music Addressability API is capable of modelling complex analytical statements containing references to music notation.
Date: 08/12/2016
Conference Name: Digital Libraries for Musicology 2016

Music notation addressability (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Music notation addressability
Author: Raffaele Viglianti
Abstract: How can one virtually ‘circle’ some music notation as one would on a printed score? How can a machine interpret this ‘circling’ to select and retrieve the relevant music notation in digital format? This paper will introduce the concept of addressability for music notation, on the basis of a comparison with textual addressability as defined by Michael Witmore (2010). Additionally, the paper will report on the work of Enhancing Music notation Addressability (EMA), a NEH-funded one-year project that has developed methods for addressing arbitrary portions of encoded music notation on the web.
Date: 07/15/2016
Primary URL: http://dh2016.adho.org/abstracts/386
Conference Name: Digital Humanities 2016

The Music Addressability API (Article)
Title: The Music Addressability API
Author: Raffaele Viglianti
Abstract: This paper describes an Application Programming Interface (API) for addressing music notation on the web regardless of the format in which it is stored. This API was created as a method for addressing and extracting specific portions of music notation published in machine-readable formats on the web. Music notation, like text, can be “addressed” in new ways in a digital environment, allowing scholars to iden- tify and name structures of various kinds, thus raising such questions as how can one virtually “circle” some music nota- tion? How can a machine interpret this “circling” to select and retrieve the relevant music notation? The API was evaluated by: 1) creating an implementation of the API for documents in the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format; and by 2) remodelling a dataset of music anal- ysis statements from the Du Chemin: Lost Voices project (Haverford College) by using the API to connect the ana- lytical statements with the portion of notaiton they refer to. Building this corpus has demonstrated that the Music Ad- dressability API is capable of modelling complex analytical statements containing references to music notation.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2970044
Format: Other
Periodical Title: ACM International Conference Proceedings Series
Publisher: ACM Press

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