making mei feel odd

Making MEI feel ODD Raffaele Viglianti

TEIMM - Zadar 11/11/2010

Making

Employing a literate programming approach for MEI

Raffaele Viglianti, Kingʼs College London TEI Members Meeting – Zadar – 11/11/2010

feel ODD



2 of 22

Introduction

MEI – Music Encoding Initiative

available at http://music-encoding.org



Introduction

The concept of music is multimodal: it exists in different media at different stages.

3 of 22

M. Babbit (1965) The use of Computers in Musicological Research

Graphemic Acoustic

Auditory



Introduction

The concept of music is multimodal: it exists in different media at different stages.

4 of 22

M. Babbit (1965) The use of Computers in Musicological Research

Graphemic Acoustic

Auditory



Introduction 5 of 22

Why MEI?

-  Inspired by TEI’s role in the Digital Humanities -  Designed to represent documents and sources, including

manuscripts -  Designed for alignment with facsimiles -  Designed to support the representation of editorial

intervention -  Supports different historical musical repertories -  Is structured in multiple modules -  Is extensible



6 of 22

Motivations

XML formats are defined with Schemata - W3C - RelaxNG - …

Weak support for - modular structure (i.e. selection of modules) - format extension



7 of 22

XML formats with specific uses - MathML; DocBook - MusicXML

XML formats addressing multiple users / uses

•  Interchange •  Source representation

•  Document •  Interpretation •  Scholarly research

TEI MEI

•  Modules ON/OFF •  Customization •  Extra Documentation

Motivations

XML formats addressing multiple users and uses need formal customization mechanisms.



8 of 22

Methodology

Literate Programming

"Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do." (D. Knuth, 1984)

One “human-friendly” document

i.e. Docbook DBLP

Documentation

Code



Methodology

Literate programming approach: one human-readable document to generate code and documentation.

9 of 22

One Document Does it all (ODD)

•  Defines TEI’s own structure •  Selecting TEI modules •  Documentation of selection •  Create customizations and document them



Methodology 10 of 22

semantic classification MODELS

ELEMENTS

normative grouping MACROS

ATTRIBUTE CLASSES

Schema(ta)

Documentation (HTML, PDF …)

ODD Processor (Roma)




semantic classification MODELS

ELEMENTS

normative grouping MACROS

ATTRIBUTE CLASSES

Schema(ta)

Documentation (HTML, PDF …)

ODD Processor (Roma)

Adopting this structure for MEI




TEI Special Interest Group in Music (Music SIG)

•  Encoding music into TEI documents and encoding music-related documents

•  Producing recommendations and examples for encoding music notation within the TEI

•  Defining a vocabulary of elements in TEI for encoding music-related content and terminology.

Making MEI feel ODD…



13 of 22

Current Work The TEI Special Interest Group in Music focuses on the encoding of music-related texts.

Small project sponsored by the TEI (to be completed by end of 2010)

1.  Migrate MEI to ODD – an opportunity to test ODD for non-TEI XML formats

2.  Produce a TEI with MEI ODD

3.  Produce recommendations and examples to be published on the SIG’s webspace.



Current work 14 of 22

MEI definition’s history: DTD > RelaxNG > ODD

•  Macrostructure (i.e. modules) :)

•  Microstructure (i.e. models, classes) :|

–  Many macros to be rethought as model classes

–  Models + ODD prefixes in references. See chapter 22 of P5 guidelines

Migrating MEI to ODD




Migrate MEI to ODD

MEI ODD source

ODD customiza3on

Schema(ta)

Documentation ODD Processor

(Roma)

MEI “ALL” ODD



Current work

TEI and MEI combined can represent an even wider range of documents.

16 of 22

TEI with MEI Possible “entry points” (still working on a final proposal)

•  Like tei:figure, possibly via a new tei:musicalNotation element

–  In paragraph; between paragraphs; between divs (i.e. chapters); in letter openers and closers; etc.

•  Next to tei:text or tei:body

•  …




Philip Gossett. Divas and Scholars. 2009. p. 320

Relationship to the text: like a figure

Music notation can be machine-readable




Carl Maria von Weber: letter to Gottfried Weber 1813-03-09




Carl Maria von Weber: Hymne op. 36

Many thanks to Johannes Kepper for this example




C. Debussy. Syrinx (La flûte de Pan) 1913

Article by first performer L. Fleury



21 of 22

Further work

•  Produce recommendations and examples to be published on the SIG’s webspace:

http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Music/

•  MEI draws on other formats’ experience

•  TEI, XHTML, EAD

•  Use ODD to document these reinterpretations

•  MEI with TEI ODD



Making

Thank you

Raffaele Viglianti, Kingʼs College London TEI Members Meeting – Zadar – 11/11/2010

feel ODD

MEI: Music SIG:

http://music-encoding.org http://www.tei-c.org/SIG/Music/

making mei feel odd

Technology

mei raffaele viglianti

mei odd3

feel odd employing

encoding of music

meiteimm zadar

orgteimm zadar

extensibleteimm zadar

pdf teimm zadar