Dear Elie,

Thank you for the kind response to this idea.

In my discussions with one of the contributors to the project described below I 
have learned that MEI itself is presently being developed in order to capture 
all of the needed information and attributes that the manuscripts present. This 
is a work in progress. I saw a draft of a table of St. Gall neumes that the 
group is working on and sent the NABC table to them for comparison. I think 
that it is possible that Gregorio has already worked out some of the encoding 
problems, although, as you say, there are still problems to solve. Nonetheless, 
if there were to be a way for porting information between the two systems, it 
seems like discussions between the platforms as they develop now would help 
ensure the greatest success of the aim. Perhaps there are insights that this 
group could offer that would help improve NABC also.

Thank you for your openness to this idea, and to your willingness to help in 
some way in developing a script for porting data to MEI. I will continue 
conversations with those involved in the Cantus Ultimus / SIMSSA 
<https://cantus.simssa.ca/> project and be in touch about potential 
collaborations with Gregorio.

Yours sincerely,
Adam



On Aug 23, 2016, at 12:56 AM, Élie Roux <elie.r...@telecom-bretagne.eu> wrote:

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

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