Annotation of Medieval Music Facsimiles Using ‘Good Enough’ OMR

The Clausula Archive of the Notre Dame Repertory (CANDR) is an in-progress PhD project with the aim of cataloguing, transcribing and analysing digital facsimiles of the thirteenth-century repertory commonly termed Notre Dame polyphony, and a secondary aim of providing new datasets and analytical tools for studying medieval polyphony. This poster highlights the use in the project of (a) a new methodology for de-skewing facsimile images, and (b) average symbol masks in an OMR–enhanced workflow with an emphasis on creating an OMR workflow that is ‘good enough’ to accelerate the annotation of an image dataset of particularly transitional notation

The musical, notational and codicological evidence of W1 for an oral transmission of Notre Dame polyphony to Scotland

The repertory of thirteenth–century polyphony commonly known as the Notre Dame school has traditionally been thought of as one of the first repertories of music to have emerged through composition rather than improvisation. Often conceived of as a product of the work of two men, Léonin and Pérotin, who each contributed to the creation of a ‘Magnus Liber Organi’ and began this tradition, Notre Dame polyphony is frequently discussed as the first polyphonic music to have been conceived in writing. Of the central manuscripts that contain this supposed ‘Magnus Liber Organi’, D-W Cod. Guelf. 628 Helmst. (W1) is the most difficult to fit into the standard view of the repertory, as its provenance from St Andrews in Scotland places it far beyond the Parisian milieu that is usually associated with the repertory. The question of how this music came to be transmitted from Paris to St Andrews has never been satisfactorily answered, leaving open questions as to who, how, and why the music was transmitted to and written down in Scotland. Reframing the discussion as an issue of cultural phenomena rather than literate music composition, I argue that indications of Notre Dame polyphony being transmitted orally rather than through exemplar manuscripts are not as far–fetched as many believe. This is due in part to our modern distrust of oral transmission, a conception of the Notre Dame repertory as a prototype of the Western art music tradition, as well as an academic failure to move beyond the flawed assumptions of much twentieth–century scholarship. Analysing the music and notation of W1 in comparison to concordant settings in other manuscripts, I bring to the forefront those large and small divergences between the music and its notation that indicate aspects of an oral tradition present in the writing of W1. I argue that these differences provide evidence to support a theory that Notre Dame polyphony was transmitted orally and was not likely to have been transmitted by direct manuscript transmission between far–flung liturgical institutions such as Notre Dame and St Andrews; rather, that Notre Dame polyphony was a pan-European cultural and musical phenomenon that spread gradually throughout Europe through oral–formulaic processes

Musical reuse in the Notre Dame repertory: historiography and new computational directions

Of the many questions that we may wish to ask of the repertory of twelfth- and thirteenth-century music commonly known as Notre Dame polyphony, issues surrounding musical reuse and borrowing suffuse nearly every aspect. Questions of chronologies, locations, composers, purposes, processes, orality, performance, transmission, as well as all manner of other unknowns in the repertory, can be well argued and evidenced by the presence (or not) of musical reuse and borrowing. The freedom with which fragments, and sometimes even entire settings of music, circulated throughout thirteenth-century musical culture appears to defy our typical notions of chronology, composition, and even deterministic process. Musicological scholarship from the 19th century to the present day places the clausula at the centre of this whirlwind of borrowings and musical–textual allusions, the enigmatic form by which the contemporary music theorist Anonymous IV contended that the modernisation of the repertory had taken place. Modern study has identified many so-called substitute clausulae in the fragments of polyphonic settings transmitted in certain fascicles of the central manuscript sources, and it is largely by these substitute clausulae that the later genre of the motet was created. However, relating substitute clausulae back to their source organa and forward to motet has proven difficult, due to the music of the Notre Dame repertory refusing to yield in all cases to the simple and causal chronology that this implies. More recent work in particular is considering how musical reuse in the Notre Dame repertory may be conceived beyond the static and one-to-one substitutions of clausulae. These are often thought of as different phenomena: processes such as indirect concordances and melodic formulae are considered entirely separate from clausula substitution. At the same time, musical reuse has been treated with a particularly restrictive historical focus, and the clausula has been given centre stage as the main vehicle for musical reuse, catalogued and analysed as tightly interwoven with motet, and minimising other forms of musical reuse in the process. However, when we try to uncover what authors actually mean when they are discussing aspects of musical reuse such as the clausula, we find their definitions inexact and conflicting. This dissertation therefore tackles the issue of musical reuse in the Notre Dame repertory afresh, placing the notation of the manuscript sources at the centre of the study and considering how the broader issue of reuse can be studied holistically in the twenty-first century, beyond limiting categorical descriptors and arbitrary criteria. By creating new methodological tools around the complex and ambiguous notation of thirteenth century polyphony, I investigate how new digital methods can be harnessed to extract patterns of musical reuse further than via simple verbatim substitution. The operation and interpretation of thirteenth century notation poses new and unique challenges for representation in the computer which have not yet been satisfactorily solved. I therefore develop novel encoding, optical music recognition, and analysis methodologies to approach these problems from new angles, centred around a specially created online database for the browsing, editing, and analysis of thirteenth-century polyphony. Using the novel tools that I present as part of this study, I extract new and previously undetected patterns of musical reuse within the repertory that fall outside of our typical perceptions of independent reuse phenomena, pointing the way towards a wider and more nuanced concept of musical reuse as a dispersed network of common musical culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is a concept that does not necessarily rely on causality or linear process, and hence may resolve the underlying issues (chronology, composition, and deterministic process) that musical reuse represents

Annotation of Medieval Music Facsimiles Using ‘Good Enough’ OMR

The Clausula Archive of the Notre Dame Repertory (CANDR) is an in-progress PhD project with the aim of cataloguing, transcribing and analysing digital facsimiles of the thirteenth-century repertory commonly termed Notre Dame polyphony, and a secondary aim of providing new datasets and analytical tools for studying medieval polyphony. This poster highlights the use in the project of (a) a new methodology for de-skewing facsimile images, and (b) average symbol masks in an OMR–enhanced workflow with an emphasis on creating an OMR workflow that is ‘good enough’ to accelerate the annotation of an image dataset of particularly transitional notation