Enhancing Music Notation Addressability (EMA) originates from the idea that music notation, like text, can be “addressed” in new ways in a digital environment, allowing scholars to identify and name structures of various kinds. However, how can one virtually “circle” music notation? and how can a machine interpret this “circling” to retrieve music notation?
To research these questions, we are teaming up with the Du Chemin: Lost Voices project (Haverford College), which is reconstructing songs printed by Nicholas Du Chemin between 1549 and 1568 in Paris. We will work on music analyses already produced by students and scholars as part of the Du Chemin project and re-model them as Linked Open Data nanopublications.
In the sciences, nanopublication is providing the research community with ways of managing attribution and documenting quality of even small contributions. The nanopublication model facilitates accurate citation and promotes massively collaborative scholarship. We seek to extend these benefits to humanities scholarship.
Each EMA nanopublication will address an arbitrary portion of music notation encoded according to the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) format. To support these addressing acts, we will develop a prototype application able to return a meaningful selection of encoded music notation.