Links for Digital Musicology

This wiki provides links to substantial projects of use to musicologists, particularly those involved with digital editions, music encoding, and topic-specific resources.

Databases

Repertories

Mass Database

Website: http://www.mdb.uni-mainz.de/

Content: Records for c.40,000 settings of the Ordinary of the Mass from 1400 to the present day. In process of migration (March 2014).

Printed Sacred Music Database

Website: http://www.printed-sacred-music.org/pages/indexes.

This collection of metadata and musical incipits (1500-1800) has been developed over decades under the direction of David Bryant at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini Onlus, Venice, with significant contributions by many individual scholars, and is now served at the Institute of Musicology, University of Fribourg (CH) and implemented by the Swiss RISM office. Search by composers, publishers, musical incipits, and much else. The musical incipits are encoded in DARMS and are rendered in mensural notation.

Medieval Music Database (MMD)

Website:http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/MMDB/Feasts/l08065000.htm

The original database, a model of integrated presentation combined with independent search of text and music fields, was developed by John Stinson and John Griffiths at LaTrobe University (Australia) between 1987 and 1999, when the university's music department was closed. It was maintained over the next five years by the University Library and is still accessible (2014) at the above link. Plans to bring it under the umbrella of DIAMM are under discussion.

One of MMD's great strength, for students of liturgy, is the ability to scroll bilaterally through the temporal and sanctoral cycles, that is by feasts of the Ordinary and those of the Proper. Many other search fields are supported including text, composer, genre, manuscript, and melody. MMD is cross-reference to the CAO database.

The musical examples in MMD were produced with Scribe software, also developed by Stinson and Griffiths (c. 1990). It encoded neumes and ligatures (mainly for 14th century music) for printing on a color deskjet printer. It was designed the DOS operating system and could export to the SCORE music-notation program.

Composers

Works of Ludwig Senfl

Website: http://www.senflonline.com/

The most important composer in Bavaria in the first half of the sixteenth century, Ludwig Senfl (c. 1490-1543) spent almost all his life in the Munich court chapel, first as choirboy, then as musician and composer. Polyphonic incipits in mensural notation are among the items that can be retrieved by genre, voicing, and so forth. Cross-linked to DIAMM.

Image Archives

Digital Image Archives of Medieval Music

Website: http://www.diamm.ac.uk/

Originally a site for viewing images of rare manuscripts at various levels of resolution, DIAMM is increasingly an umbrella site for diverse projects in medieval music. The core textual database is organized by source location. Registered users may add their own comments about individual works. List and faceted search capabilities are currently being added. Now includes an online teaching resource for musicians wishing to learn more about the notation of medieval music. Register at http://diamm.nsms.ox.ac.uk/moodle/.

Musica Sacra

Website:http://musicasacra.com

Content: notable collection of scanned chant books at http://musicasacra.com/music/ and http://musicasacra.com/resource-lists/. Includes the Liber Usualis and many other resources for modern use in traditional settings.

Resources for Chronology

Hofmeister XIX

Website: http://www.hofmeister.rhul.ac.uk/2008/index.html

Content: Database of 330,000 records from the Hofmeister Monatsberichte, 1829-1900, listing music publications of the period. Compiled by Friedrich Hofmeister and published in Leipzig by Breitkopf & Härtel. Well indexed for quick searches.

Libretto Portals

VifaMusik Libretto Portal

Website: http://libretti.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/start/static.html

The new (2014) VifaMusik Libretto Portal searches across component collections held in the Bavarian State Library, the Frankfurt University Library, and the Library of the German Institute in Rome. 5,600 digitized sources are available for viewing and downloading.

Corniani-Algarotti Collection

Website: http://www.braidense.it/cataloghi/catalogo_rd.php

Although the search form shows only four field, the name field (nome) will accept almost any proper noun (surname of composer, librettist, scenographer, city, theater, etc.). Most sources are digitized and downloadable. Holds 9,000 libretti from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Mainly opera, but includes some oratorio and serenata texts.

Search Engines for Music

Europeana: Search Engine for European Music

Website: http://www.europeana.eu

This umbrella site for European digitization projects covers a great deal beyond music. To start, limit the search by an obvious word for music (musique, musica, Musik, etc.). This will give you an idea of how to further limit the search. Europeana is updated often. Among the items that should be visible are music prints, manuscripts, newspapers dedicated to music, sheet-music, audio files, etc. Since Europeana is an aggregation, it provides links back to the sponsoring libraries that hold the original sources. The site can be searched in many languages.

Peachnote Music n-Gram Viewer

Website: http://www.peachnote.com/#!nt=singleNoteAffine&npq=62+0+1+2+0+-2+-1+-2

MIDI-based search by string.

Themefinder: Music-Incipit Search

Website: http://www.themefinder.org

Related literature: "Search-Effectiveness Measures for Symbolic Music Queries inVery Large Databases" (Craig Stuart Sapp, Yi-Wen Liu, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field)

The Themefinder search engine was prototyped at CCARH in 1996 by David Huron, Andreas Kornstädt, and Walter B. Hewlett. A large number of Stanford University students including Unjung Kim and Leigh VanHandel plus visiting students including Bret Aarden, participated in its early development. The search engine was originally developed to study user behavior. Over the intervening years it has been used for a large statistical study of search-efficiency. The current search engine is by Craig Stuart Sapp.

Themefinder contains several repertories, most of which are publicly viewable and searchable. The principal repertories are Folk, Classical, and Renaissance. Although more than 100,000 incipits and associated metadata are present in the database, users may select just one. "Hits" satisfying search-criteria can be collected on the Themefinder Clipboard and can be exported.

Incipits can be searched at five points on a continuing from the most specific to the fuzziest. Filter for meter, mode, and key may be used. MIDI files are available for each entry. Help menus area available at the website. Those interested in contributing an encoded repertory to Themefinder should describe the existing repertory and format in a query letter.

Historical Maps

David Rumsey Map Collection

Website: http://www.davidrumsey.com

Contents: 18th and19th century maps of the Americas. All maps are geo-encoded to facilitate geo-spatial and past-time applications.

Resources in Parallel Disciplines

Digital Scriptorium

Website:http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/digitalscriptorium/

Content: Image database of medieval and renaissasnce manuscripts. Based at the University of California, Berkeley, it includes holdings from many US libraries, with extensive folio-specific information about each source.

Index of Christian Art

Website: ica1.princeton.edu/

One hundred twenty thousand (120,000) images from public and private collections in the English-speaking world plus additional indicies; roughly 100,000 are available to public via fee-sbased institutional subscriptions. Holdings from early centuries of Christianity to 1550.