“Musicologists and Their Sources: The Alchemy of Turning Parchment into Pixels”

On Monday morning, June 24, Elsa De Luca, Martha Thomae, and Antoine Phan explained the methodology, digital tools, and goals of the ‘Echoes from the Past’ project. ECHOES aims to achieve a deeper understanding of early chant repertory from medieval Portugal. While the primary research questions are musicological, the project heavily incorporates information technologies, including the development and application of techniques such as Optical Music Recognition (OMR) and the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) for early music scores. By combining these technologies in innovative ways, ECHOES will make this chant repertory, which was integral to the cultural identity of the Braga region for centuries, accessible to scholars and music enthusiasts. Importantly, the team uses these technologies in response to the musicological questions, rather than solely as outputs, as they require interpretation through the lens of domain expertise.

The focus of the presentation was on music retrieval tools. They provided us with comprehensive instructions on how to preprocess a document, which involves preparing the manuscript images to ensure optimal accuracy during the OMR process. We were also guided through the steps needed to prepare the data for encoding, transforming the recognized musical notation into MEI format. This process is crucial for creating a machine-readable file that can be analysed and manipulated using digital tools. The machine-readability is crucial for building a corpus for analysis at large scale.

In the afternoon, we met again and, coordinated by Elsa De Luca, began discussing our presentations for the upcoming conference and the deliverables required by this STSM. We shared our research topics, received feedback on our presentation styles, and collaboratively refined our content to better align with other participants. 

On Tuesday morning, the seminar series continued with an in-depth presentation by Martha E. Thomae and Elsa De Luca on the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) and its uses for early music research. Through multiple practical examples they provided us with comprehensive information on the MEI format, including the hierarchical structure, the elements and the attributes of the MEI file. The main focus of the presentation was the neumes module and the specific components needed for encoding different neumes. Attention was drawn also to the main challenges when encoding neumatic notations: the conveyance of only partial musical information, the presence of a great variety of signs and regional styles, and the existence of different neume shapes with the same name.

At the end of our workshop sessions, the CESEM team, together with the members of the Music Department of the Portuguese National Library in Lisbon, kindly offered us another activity that would take us back to the beginning of our efforts – the parchment and the sources. On Wednesday 26th June, we were invited to a guided visit to the library, where we had the opportunity to see various musical sources, some of which had been the subject of discussion over the previous days and had been studied in different – including digital – ways. There were richly ornamented mediaeval and later liturgical chant books on parchment and paper, in smaller and larger formats, as well as various works of great importance for Portuguese music history up to the end of the 20th century. Each of these sources has had a very special and sometimes very eventful history (habent sua fata libelli…), so we are fortunate to be able to see and study them even today. Our visit to the library undoubtedly gave us further insight into working with the endangered sources in the analogue and digital world.