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。它利用了新的早期音乐在线（EMO）收集的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。由此产生的编码分数，无论是声乐和琵琶音乐，可以在许多方面进行操作：音频播放，重新格式化，打印，编辑和转换成其他格式。它们将通过ECOLM网站免费提供给所有人，无论是业余爱好者还是专业学者和音乐家。为了让音乐学受益于目前正在转变的基于文本的学术研究的技术进步，我们需要机器可读的乐谱编码。目前，一些资源提供适合的高质量的编码部分的核心经典的古典音乐，但很少是直接从历史来源，而不是从绝版的标准版本。琵琶音乐电子语料库（ECOLM）最初由Tim Crawford于1999年在AHRB资助下建立，一直致力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称为手谱的记谱法，只有弹奏琵琶的人才能轻松地读懂。使用优化的光学字符识别方法与16世纪印刷音乐一起工作（部分原因是在ECOLM II中进行的开创性试验），编码现在可以在琵琶音乐的情况下使用光学谱表识别（OTR）或光学音乐识别（OMR）半自动完成声乐印刷部分书籍（以更正常的记谱法）。为了更正OTR和OMR中的错误（由16 -c印刷问题或损坏的来源引起的），我们将寻求最了解这些符号形式的人的帮助。对于琵琶音乐，这些是世界范围内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，并习惯于阅读谱子；对于声乐，我们将寻求音乐学家和其他音乐家的帮助，业余的和专业的。使用我们开发的基于网络的编辑软件所做的修改将反馈到每个系统的识别过程中，逐渐提高准确性，直到最终几乎不需要人工干预。我们的工作流程将被设计为确保系统的语料库增长，优先考虑声乐收藏作品也在EMO语料库作为琵琶安排。我们期望半自动编码大约1000个琵琶作品和大约相同数量的声乐作品（主要是法国香颂），保留曲目有很大的重叠。我们将对以下主题进行初步的音乐学调查：(a)琵琶编曲与其声乐模型之间的关系，(b)两个剧目中特征旋律和和声模式（例如节奏数字）的识别，以及(c)这些模式在世纪中的变化方式。这些构成了未来对不断增长的语料库进行研究的基础。项目结束时，将在英国皇家博物馆举办一个关于项目及其成果的公开研讨会，并在附近著名的国王广场举办一场音乐会，由英国皇家博物馆和英国琵琶协会联合推广，项目成果将在最高国际标准的专业表演中得到体现。第三期ECOLM利用了自构想为第二期ECOLM提供AHRB/C资金第二阶段以来出现的新机会。我们将与我们的合作伙伴，BL音乐系和英国琵琶协会，密切合作，与EMO的资源，以最大限度地实现互利，并确保其迅速吸收和影响，不仅是学术音乐学家和专业演奏家，而且是世界范围内的业余歌手，琵琶手和其他音乐家社区。

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.