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Werner Icking Music Archive (WIMA)

Website: Werner Icking Music Archive

The recent history of the Werner Icking Music Archive. Icking and several colleagues developed a music-printing capability that was modeled on the TeX metafont and typesetting system. He built an online capability for users to share scores they had edited and typeset themselves. In many cases this included full sets of parts. Some editions were arrangements. MusiTeX (and related dialects) were often traded within the community, but some of the contributions predated the widespread use of the internet. After Icking's death (2001), his archive was administered by a contributor, Christian Mondrup. In 2011-12 it was amalgamated with the IMSLP aggregation. Icking offered an important prototype for current score-interchange sites.

Emerging Desktop Notation Systems of the 1980s and 1990s

The Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities distributed an annual survey to notation-software developers. Examples of specific challenges in notation software were provided. This was a period of rapid change in printing and computer computer technology, as well as operating systems. Nothing stayed the same for long. At its peak the solicitation drew 88 respondents who were eager to show off their latest capabilities. Methods for reproducing their submission, with integrated text and graphics, lagged somewhat behind. Edmund Correia Jr. (a pianist) coordinated the submissions and supervised reproduction of the examples.

In 1994 the IEEE Computer Society published a resume of specific problem types and selected contributions. We made our final solicitation in 1996. By then the dynamism of the field was starting to fade, and a few commercially funded programs began to dominate. We show here a selection of materials as originally submitted. (Some are labeled with details of the printing system used.)

• Amadeus at its best produced elegant notation of limitless complexity based in Poeking, DE. (Output was scalable to 1000 dots per inch.) It was a stand-alone system that traced its origins to the Atari Mega ST4. Kurt Maas was the designer.

Mensurstriche and musica ficta in an early example from Calliope.

• Calliope, graphics-based program developed in the Cambridge Computing Laboratory by William Clocksin, ran on the NextStep operating system. It offered support for early music, lute tablature, and chant repertories.

• Common Music Notation (CMN), a LISP-based program by Bill Schottstaedt, was developed at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCMRA) at Stanford University. Composers using LISP and Heinrich Taube's Common Music were the principal users.

• Dai Nippon Music Processor was developed by the Dai Nippon Printing Company LTD om Ichigawa, JP. Alphanumeric input code was output to MIDI instruments, PostScript printers, a Digiset typesetter, and the Standard Musicc Expression (SMX) file format, which was principally exchanged with a research group at Waseda University. Featured in from 1988 to 1992.

• Graphire Music Press of Wilder, VT, was a high-end system by Alan Talbot, who also developed the Synclavier Music Engraving System. Graphire MP supported line-art graphics, provided a page-layout progeram, and employed a notation expert system. It offered special provisions for shape-note and handbell notation and well as the ability to combine different kinds of notation in one score. Its primary uses were commercial.

• LIME, or Lippold's Music Editor, was developed Lippold Haken (University of Illinois) and Dorothea Blostein (Queen's University, Kingston, ON) c1991. A multifaceted complex of prrograms, LIME supported PostScript imaging devices and on-demand printing. At its peak more than 110,000 copies in distribution. The graphical editor was used in NovaNet (PLATO) teaching applications, and it was foundational in the development of programs for unsighted musicians by Dancing Dots (Valley Forge, PA). In recent years Haken has developed the Continuum Keyboard.