Digital Humanities in Early Music Research

A series of conferences and workshops focusing on the use of digital humanities in early music research.

A series of conferences and workshops focusing on the use of digital humanities in early music
research. The series is open to the public free of charge. Reservation is required: please contact
jointly the coordinator Jana Franková (Tato e-mailová adresa je chráněna před spamboty. Pro její zobrazení musíte mít povolen Javascript.) and Hana Vlhová-Wörner (Tato e-mailová adresa je chráněna před spamboty. Pro její zobrazení musíte mít povolen Javascript.)

Session II online – Databases and digital editions of early music
22–30 June 2020
Mondays June 22 and 29 always 4–5 p.m.,
Wednesday June 24 at 4–7:15 p.m.
Tuesday June 30 at 4–7:15 p.m.
online sessions via Zoom

Monday 29 June Presentation II
4–4:45 p.m.
MEI for Encoding Mensural Music – A Survey
(Martha E. Thomae, McGill University, Montréal, Canada)
A peculiarity of mensural notation is the context-dependent nature of the duration of the notes.
Mensural pieces are commonly written in separate parts, a layout that does not allow us to visualize the
vertical sonorities and appreciate the polyphonic texture of the piece. Although many mensural pieces
are encoded in symbolic formats (e.g., MusicXML and MIDI), these files tend to encode the modern
transcription of the piece rather than its original (mensural) values. MEI, instead, allows encoding
mensural music in the original notation through its Mensural Module. This presentation showcases
some projects that have worked on encoding mensural music in MEI. The common goal of these
projects is to present the mensural pieces as scores in the original notation. The MEI representation
allows visualizing the vertical sonorities (which are hindered by the separate-parts layout of the original
sources) while still maintaining the notation of the sources, thus avoiding to lose some important details
of the notation in modern transcriptions.
discussion