KateHelsen, JenniferBain, IchiroFujinaga, AndrewHankinson

and DebraLacoste

egend has it that when Walter Howard Frere

created his taxonomy of chant melodic phrases a
century ago, he cut up hundreds of his transcriptions
into small slips of paper and then arranged them in
musically similar groups on the table in front of him.1
He must have lived in terror of a sneeze. Even 30years
ago, Andrew Hughess first attempt at sorting 400
chant incipits on the University of Torontos computer
mainframe crashed the system because, he was told,
the task was too large and complex for its memory.2
Yet medieval musicologists have remained eager to
use emerging technologies because we cannot shake
the feeling that the challenges of our work would benefit from technological solutions. It is simply a matter
of communicationcommunication across disciplines that, on the face of it, could hardly seem further
apart: digital technology and medieval musicology.
Over the past several decades, traditional methods
of conducting research on medieval sources have been
revolutionized by innovations in document and imageanalysis software, mark-up and source-encoding methods and databases, and the capacity of the internet to
connect these areas and make the results accessible to
scholars around the world. Experts in computer science and musicology are now working together to produce the ideal online research environment for early
musical sources through a project centred at McGill
University entitled Single Interface for Music Score
Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA).3 One of SIMSSAs
aims is to provide optical music recognition (OMR)
software to search for musical content. (This initiative is comparable to the optical character recognition
(OCR) software used in digital text collections such as

Google Books to search for specific words.) SIMSSA

will provide a nexus for all early music scores already
freely available online courtesy of various library and
archive websites. In addition, this project is already creating links between online databases containing information about manuscript sources, such as CANTUS,4
and digitized images of each page of these sources. The
thousand-year gap between medieval chant and digital
technology is being bridged.
Scholars who work with centuries-old manuscripts
routinely encounter practical barriers in their work.
The physical deterioration of the manuscript material
might obscure its contents, or it may be inaccessible
to the researcher because of its location or condition.
The thrill of working directly with a precious artefact
aside, sometimes musicologists find their research
limited by the high value and rarity of the manuscripts
themselves. A generation ago, trips to many libraries were required or, at the very least, libraries had to
be contacted and arrangements made for microfilms
to be sent by post, a process that could take months.
Once the manuscript was consulted, it was often the
job of a lone researcher to accurately retain information about its contents; that is, the type of notation it
contained, the number of scribal hands represented,
and any history of later corrections or additions, not to
mention making notes about the materials from which
the manuscript was made: inks, parchment type and
arrangement, the dimensions of its layout and evidence
of tools used for scoring, writing and binding. The
quality of these assessments depended on the scholars
depth of experience and ability to mentally compare
the manuscript at hand to others consulted previously.

Early Music, Vol. xlii, No. 4 The Authors 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1093/em/cau092, available online at www.em.oxfordjournals.org
Advance Access publication October 7, 2014

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Optical music recognition and manuscript

chant sources

to deal comprehensively and completely with even a single

liturgical book may take years of patient research. How
many such books have been adequately described by a
competent authority? Five percent? .... To proceed with
liturgical research that is appropriately placed in its context, we must at least know what is available. An international project is required.6

His statement, written about a decade ago, has

proven prescient. With the dominance of digitalimage technology, and more and more complete
manuscripts widely available on the internet, the aim
now must be to establish a standardized approach
for analysing these images and allowing their musical content to be searched online in a unifiedway.
Medieval musical notation, however, poses an
interesting challenge for todays image-processing and
document-analysis software. The musical staff, if it is
included in the notation at all, is not composed of a
standard number of lines, and the shapes of notes and
ligatures vary according to era and place. The earliest
kind of notation in the West, known as St Gall notation, shown in illus.1, is made up of unheightened,
staffless neumes; that is, groupings of notes or musical
gestures drawn in the white space above the lines of
text. Unlike virtually all other kinds of musical notation, these neumes do not represent absolute pitch,
nor do they indicate rhythm or even reliably line up
vertically with the chant text copied belowthem.
How, then, can image analysis software help to
bring this kind of notation into the scope of a standardized representation for all early music content, an
objective that SIMSSA hopes to achieve? The answer
lies in the ability of OMR software to identify distinct
neume shapes and classify them according to musical
meaning, as established by a ground-truth, or humanannotated set of exemplar shapes. This is analogous to

556Early MusicNovember 2014

OCR software that can identify handwritten text by

breaking it down into discrete alphabetic characters,
and then categorize those characters according to their
meaning rather than their exact rendering on the page
(since, for example, the shape of an r will be different
when written in majuscule, cursive or print, but any
of these graphic forms still represents the sound r).
Illus.2 shows a portion of the ground-truth set for St
Gall notation, where virga strata and porrectus signs
are itemized and represented by several versions drawn
in different hands throughout a single manuscript.
The ground-truth set for St Gall notation currently
contains over 110 different neume signs and provides
the information that a web-based neume-recognition system, currently under development, uses to
classify every neume in a single medieval book. We
have chosen as a proving ground for the software
Hartkers Antiphoner, a well-known notated liturgical chant manuscript with music for the Office compiled around 990, housed in the Stiftsbibliothek at St
Gallen under the shelfmark Cod. Sang. 390/391. The
manuscript is one of hundreds of medieval sources
that have been digitized as high-quality images and
made available online in Switzerlands e-codices project.7 It is an especially good test case for automated
neume recognition because two scholars, Ike de Loos
and Kees Pouderoijen, recently found through visual
inspection that there are at least five scribal hands
represented in its musical notation.8 Matching their
findings to the ones generated by image recognition
software will produce an objective measurement of
accuracy and identify any problems with the software
before it is used with other manuscripts.
Once the neume shapes in a source have been automatically identified, they must be stored in a computerreadable format so that other software may use the
results of the recognition process. SIMSSA researchers are making use of the Music Encoding Initiative
(MEI),9 an open-source and community-developed
system capable of encoding the notation structures
present in a wide range of music document sources,
from medieval manuscript sources to modern notation. The MEI is inspired by similar efforts in the text
encoding community with the Text Encoding Initiative
(TEI), and has adopted many of the same methods
for capturing and encoding the content of a musical
source. Beyond simply being a format for describing a
source, however, MEI is also capable of capturing and

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Not surprisingly therefore, detailed scholarship on

primary medieval sources has traditionally been conducted on books believed to be representative of a particular region or rite. But how can we know they are, in
fact, representative? Bruno Stblein estimates that perhaps one in a thousand medieval liturgical books has
survived to the present, and since there are about 30,000
extant sources in total, there may have been about 30
million books produced during the medieval period.5
Andrew Hughes, in suggesting the number of extant
sources may even be higher than 30,000, remarks

1 Sankt Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, 390 (Cod. Sang. 390), p.33 (detail)

preserving the discussion and choices around editorial

decisions. This makes it the ideal resource for encoding
non-standard scribal hands and early notationforms.
The combination of an automatically transcribed
source, access to the original document image and
an encoding format that preserves both source and
critical apparatus, is the foundation of the digital
music edition. With these three components, users
of an online source system can track the provenance
of editorial decisions and compare them in reference
to the original source image. Moreover, maintaining
correspondence between the original source image
and the automatically transcribed melodic content
provides users with page-level access within the
source. Asearch for a particular melodic construction can retrieve individual page images, rather than
simply retrieving a transcription of the content.
Although conducting automated melodic comparisons between documents is a relatively new idea,
cross-referencing and comparing manuscripts according to a database of their more general content began

over 25years ago with the establishment of CANTUS.

Once simply a collection of indices for medieval Office
chants, CANTUS has grown to include analysis tools
and an online data-entry system, allowing researchers
from around the world accessand the ability to contributeto a wealth of information about thousands
of chants found in hundreds of medieval manuscripts.
The content for each source indexed by CANTUS is
included in a database made up of information about
each chant, including its text, the saints Office or the
liturgical occasion for which it is sung, its physical
position on the page, its mode, a unique chant identification number and other details. By linking these
data to online images of each page and through the
application of OMR, researchers will be able to study,
analyse and compare more material than they have
ever been able to in the past, even when that material is written in very different notational systems. As
proof-of-concept, the researchers at the Distributed
Digital Music Archives and Libraries (DDMAL)
lab combined the digital images of the 16th-century

Early MusicNovember 2014557

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2 Ground-truth set for St Gall notation, showing virga strata and porrectus neumes, developed by Inga Behrendt, Kate
Helsen and Anton Stingl

and what new insights might be gained once the task

has been completed. The application of document
analysis, mark-up languages and databases to medieval musicological research is meant to reduce the
amount of time researchers must spend on repetitive
and non-intellectual procedures, allowing them to
focus on the implications of their results, or on areas
of their study that require discernment. Digital technology allows more manuscripts to be examined and
compared than ever before, giving us a more accurate
and faster overview of the wealth of medieval sources
that come down to us today. Far from providing a
substitute for the examination of these sources by the
human mind, it will, instead, expand them.

Kate Helsen is a part-time Assistant Professor in the Department of Music Research and Composition
at Western University, Ontario. Her publications may be found in numerous journals, and she also
sings professionally with the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir in Toronto. katehelsen@gmail.com
Jennifer Bain is Associate Professor at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. In addition to her work
developing digital tools for the study of medieval chant, she has co-edited a collection of essays on
Guillaume de Machaut, and in 2015 her book, Hildegard of Bingen and musical reception: the modern revival of a medieval composer, will be published.
Ichiro Fujinaga is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Music Technology Area at the Schulich
School of Music at McGill University. His research interests include music theory, machine learning,
music perception, signal processing, genetic algorithms and music information retrieval.
Andrew Hankinson is a PhD candidate at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. He has
been involved with the Music Encoding Initiative since 2011.
Debra Lacoste is Project Manager and Principal Researcher of CANTUS: A Database for Latin
Ecclesiastical Chant. She has numerous publications and teaches at the University of Waterloo, Ontario.
1 For his results, relevant and
impressive still today, see W.H.
Frere, Introduction to Antiphonale
Sarisburiense: a reproduction in
facsimile of a manuscript of the
thirteenth century (London, 190124).
2 A. Hughes, Rebellion and serendipity,
in The Becket Project: paradigms for
liturgical research, ii, ed. K.Helsen
(Lions Bay, Canada, 2014), p.7 (in press).
3 I. Fujinaga, Single interface for music
score searching and analysis, McGill
University, http://simssa.ca/.
4 F. Wiering, Digital critical editions
of music: a multidimensional model,
in Modern methods for musicology:

prospects, proposals, and realities, ed.

T.Crawford and L.Gibson (Burlington,
VT, 2009), pp.2346.
5 D. Lacoste etal., CANTUS:
Adatabase for Latin ecclesiastical
chant, University of Waterloo (ON),
http://cantusdatabase.org/.
6 B. Stblein, Schriftbild der
einstimmigen Musik, Musikgeschichte
in Bildern iii/4 (Leipzig, 1975), p.102.
7 C. Fleler etal., e-codices: Virtual
manuscript library of Switzerland,
University of Fribourg, www.e-codices.
unifr.ch/en.
8 K. Pouderoijen and I.de Loos,
Wer ist Hartker? Die Entstehung

558Early MusicNovember 2014

des Hartkerischen Antiphonars, in

Beitrge zur Gregorianik, xlvii (2009),
pp.6786.
9 See P.Roland, A.Hankinson and
L.Pugin, Early music and the Music
Encoding Initiative, in this issue.
10 For more about the Distributed
Digital Music Archives and Libraries,
see http://ddmal.music.mcgill.ca/;
the DDMAL Salzinnes Antiphonal
interface is at http://ddmal.music.
mcgill.ca/salzinnes. The original
manuscript is held at the Patrick
Power Library at Saint Marys
University, Halifax (CDN-Hsmu
m2149.l4 1554).

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Cistercian antiphonal from the Abbey of Salzinnes in

Namur (modern-day Belgium) with the CANTUS
records for it on an online platform.10 While scrolling through images of the manuscript online, the
researcher can also see the indexed information about
each chant from the CANTUS Database in a panel to
the right of the image. The full Latin text of the manuscript is searchable through the leftpanel.
Usually the adoption of new technologies is accompanied by a sense of uncertainty. Will the automation
of what was once a human task result in replacing
human sensitivity, intuition and experience with
cold, computer logic? Such fears reside in a misunderstanding of the difference between the task itself