Dear Adam, Thank you for your very interesting email!
> The conversations tended toward a technology called MEI > <http://music-encoding.org/> (Music Coding Initiative) which the > researchers believe can contain all of the needed information in > chant manuscripts for effective querying, comparative analysis, etc. Looking at http://music-encoding.org/documentation/3.0.0/neumes/ I think this is true most of the time, I'm just unsure about how it deals with some rare neumes that don't appear in the list... > I know that I have made use of Gregobase, however, for effective > research queries and tend to think that GABC, and, potentially, NABC > are systematic and thorough enough to achieve the same goal. The > group appears to see MEI as the right language for research while > GABC / NABC are perhaps best for producing practical editions. Well, the main difference I see is that MEI is far less precise than Gregorio for square notation. For instance MEI doesn't seem to allow episemi, aucta, etc. and doesn't differenciate the many different ways to write a pressus... Unless there is more than of MEI that I didn't see? Also for nabc, I'm no expert but the situation seems to be exactly the same, if you take a look at https://github.com/gregorio-project/gregorio/releases/download/v4.2.0-rc3/GregorioNabcRef.pdf you'll certainly see many neumes that you would all encode in the same way in MEI. > My question: I wonder if it might be possible to find a way to allow > GABC / NABC to communicate and share data with MEI? I think it would be fairly easy to allow Gregorio to write MEI, but it would be read-only: as there is more information in gabc or nabc than in MEI, it seems that it would not make much sense to turn MEI into gabc/nabc... I'm not really sure about the best way to do that though. My first idea would be a python script, but it would have to make an interpretation of gabc which may be slightly different from Gregorio in corner cases... or it could parse the "dump" output of gregorio... It would have to interpret nabc anyway, as the interpretation in done on the Lua side. What do other developers think? > For those interested in research, the tools that the musicological > community could bring to the table appear to be quite immense. It > seems that a digital Paleography Workshop could be assembled quite > quickly with these tools—with Gregobase and all of the work done by > Cantus, among others, a firm foundation is already in place. Sure, that's a very good project! > Is anyone here interested in this idea? Or of collaborating with the > Cantus group, or of finding ways to port GABC / NABC code over to > databases for musicological research? I'm not able to invest much time into this project, but I can give a few directions and hints. But it's possible that a script for converting gabc/nabc into MEI is not that hard and could be make quickly at least in a first version... Thank you, -- Elie _______________________________________________ Gregorio-users mailing list Gregorio-users@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/gregorio-users
