MIR for Early Music Documents: Technologies Behind the Semi-Automatic Encoding of Mensural Sources into Symbolic Scores

In this presentation, we will cover various technologies needed for the semi-automatic encoding of mensural sources into symbolic scores. Mensural sources refer to the polyphonic music sources of the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, written on an earlier music notation system called “mensural notation.” Mensural sources are usually written in some separate-parts layout, with the voices kept on different areas of the page; this makes it harder to visualize the vertical sonorities that become apparent only when the voices are lined up in a score layout. However, scoring up the voices requires an expert because, for triple meter, the duration of the notes in mensural notation is not absolute but context-dependent. This presentation focuses on the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) technologies involved in the semi-automatic encoding of mensural sources into machine-readable scores. These technologies include a few symbolic formats (MEI and Humdrum **mens), optical music recognition software (MuRET), automatic scoring-up software for mensural notation (included within an online mensural notation editor called the Measuring Polyphony Editor), and computational music analysis tools for Renaissance music (humlib’s dissonance filter). A real-life example of the digitization and encoding of a seventeenth-century music manuscript from the Americas will illustrate the use of these technologies.