ECOLM III: opening historical music resources to the world's on-line researchers

ECOLM III将半自动地建立一个计算机可读的语料库，其中包含大约2000首16世纪的声乐和琵琶音乐。它借鉴了新的早期音乐在线(EMO)收藏的300本来自BL的16-c音乐的数字化书籍，并将使用最先进的光学识别方法，在学术和专业表演中展示结果。由此产生的声乐和琵琶音乐的编码乐谱可以通过许多方式进行处理：音频回放、重新格式化、打印、编辑和转换为其他格式。它们将通过ECOLM网站免费提供给所有人，无论是业余的还是专业的学者和音乐家。为了使音乐学受益于目前正在改变基于文本的学术的技术进步，我们需要机器可读的乐谱编码。目前，一些资源提供了古典音乐中央经典部分的合适的高质量编码，但很少有直接来自历史来源的编码，而不是来自绝版的标准版本。鲁特音乐电子语料库(ECOLM)最初是由蒂姆·克劳福德于1999年由AHRB资助建立的，一直专注于将琵琶音乐来源的完整内容编码为高学术标准。琵琶音乐使用一种特殊的记谱形式，称为表音法，只有演奏这种乐器的人才能轻松阅读。使用优化为与16世纪印刷音乐一起工作的光学字符识别方法(部分是由于在ECOLM II中进行的开创性试验的结果)，对于琵琶音乐，现在可以使用光学表格识别(OTR)半自动地完成编码，或者对于声乐印刷部分书(以更正常的记法)使用光学音乐识别(OMR)。为了纠正OTR和OMR中的错误(由16-C打印问题或损坏的信号源引起)，我们将聘请最了解这些符号形式的人的帮助。对于琵琶音乐，他们是世界范围内的业余琵琶演奏者社区的成员，他们在网上非常活跃地分享图像，并习惯于阅读曲谱；对于声乐，我们将寻求音乐专家和其他音乐家的帮助，无论是业余的还是专业的。使用我们开发的基于网络的编辑软件所做的更正将反馈到每个系统的识别过程中，逐渐提高准确率，直到最终几乎不需要人工干预。我们的工作流程将确保系统的语料库增长，优先考虑也在emo语料库中的作品作为琵琶安排的声音集合。我们预计将对大约1,000首琵琶作品和大约相同数量的声乐作品(主要是法国香颂)进行半自动编码，并有大量的曲目重叠。我们将就如下主题进行初步的音乐学研究：(A)琵琶演奏与其声乐模式之间的关系；(B)识别两个曲目中具有特色的旋律和和声模式(例如节奏图形)；以及(C)这些模式在一个世纪中的变化方式。这些构成了未来对不断增长的语料库进行调查的基础。该项目的最后将是一个关于该项目及其成果的公开工作坊，并在附近著名的场地国王广场举行音乐会，这是与BL和英国琵琶协会共同推动的，项目的成果将在最高国际水平的专业表演中展示。ECOLM III利用自AHRB/C为ECOLM II提供第二阶段资助的概念以来出现的新机会。与我们的合作伙伴，BL音乐部和英国琵琶协会，我们将与EMO资源密切合作，以最大限度地实现互惠互利，并确保其迅速被学术音乐学家和专业表演者，以及世界各地的业余歌手、琵琶演奏家和其他音乐家所接受和影响。

ECOLM III will semi-automatically build a computer-readable corpus of around 2,000 pieces of vocal and lute music from the 16th century. It draws on the new Early Music Online (EMO) collection of 300 digitised books of 16th-c music from the BL, and will use state-of-the-art optical recognition methods, presenting the results both in scholarship and in professional performances. The resulting encoded scores, of both vocal and lute music, can be manipulated in many ways: audio playback, reformatting, printing, editing and conversion into other formats. They will be made freely available to all, amateur and professional scholars and musicians alike, via the ECOLM web-site.For musicology to benefit from the technological advances currently transforming text-based scholarship, we need machine-readable encodings of musical scores. At present, a few resources provide suitable high-quality encodings of parts of the central canon of classical music, but very few are done directly from historical sources rather than from out-of-print standard editions. The Electronic Corpus of Lute Music (ECOLM), originally set up with AHRB funding by Tim Crawford in 1999, has consistently concentrated on encoding complete contents of sources of lute music to high scholarly standards. Lute music uses a special form of notation called tablature, which only players of the instrument can read with ease. Using optical character recognition methods optimised to work with 16th-century printed music (partly as a result of pioneering trials carried out within ECOLM II), encodings can now be done semi-automatically using optical tablature recognition (OTR) in the case of lute music or optical music recognition (OMR) for the printed part-books of vocal music (in more normal notation). For correction of errors in OTR and OMR (caused by problems with 16th-c printing or damaged sources) we will engage the help of the people who know these forms of notation best. For lute music, these are members of a world-wide community of amateur lute players who are both highly active online in sharing images and used to reading tablature; for vocal music we will enlist the help of musicologists and other musicians, amateur and professional. The corrections made, using web-based editing software we have developed, will feed back into the recognition process of each system, gradually improving accuracy until eventually almost no human intervention is required.Our workflow will be designed to ensure systematic corpus growth, prioritising vocal collections with works also in the EMO corpus as lute arrangements. We expect to encode semi-automatically around 1,000 lute pieces and about the same number of vocal works (mainly French chansons), with significant overlap of repertory. We shall carry out preliminary musicological investigations on topics such as: (a) relationships between lute arrangements and their vocal models, (b) identification of characteristic melodic and harmonic patterns (e.g. cadence figures) in both repertories, and (c) the way in which these changed over the century. These form the basis for future investigations of the growing corpus. The project will end with a public workshop on the project and its outputs at the BL, and also a concert at the prestigious nearby venue, King's Place, promoted jointly with the BL and the UK Lute Society, in which fruits of the project will be made manifest in professional performances of the highest international standard.ECOLM III takes advantage of new opportunities arising since the conception of the second phase of AHRB/C funding for ECOLM II. With our partners, the BL Music Dept and the UK Lute Society, we shall work closely with the EMO resource to maximise mutual benefit and to ensure its rapid uptake and impact not only by academic musicologists and professional performers but also by a world-wide community of amateur singers, lute-players and other musicians.