Encoding medieval music notation for research

Abstract

Encoding massive amounts of medieval music notation provides the raw data needed for gaining a systematic understanding of differences and similarities in musical writing, and for researching notation's role in compositional process and musical transmission in medieval societies. The ability to represent all forms of medieval music notation electronically is also of utmost importance for current and future projects which are developing Optical Music Recognition systems for medieval notation and creating searchable datasets of now plentiful online images of digitized medieval music manuscripts. In this report the authors outline their efforts to date in encoding medieval music notation using the pioneering 'Scribe' software and their current collaboration on transforming 'Scribe' data into a valuable pool of open access research data for distribution on the internet, for both musicologists and generalists interested in the study and performance of medieval music from original notation.