27.7.2018 | Leipzig IAML Leipzig 2018

IncipitSearch

Interlinking Musicological Repositories

Slides: https://digicademy.github.io/2018_IAML_IncipitSearch

Anna Neovesky & Frederic von Vlahovits | @digicademy | digicademy | CC-BY 4.0 Digital Academy, Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz

Overview

The idea behind IncipitSearch
Incipits in musicology
The IncipitSearch web application
Integrated data
API and reintegration
Outlook and Conclusion

01

The idea behind IncipitSearch

1. Institutional impetus

The Academy of Sciences and Literature | Mainz coordinates 15 musicological projects
Need of an incipit search in the Gluck-Gesamtausgabe‘s catalogue raisonnee
Intuitive way to research music
Identification and illustration of concordances

Opera “Antigono” in the digital catalogue of Gluck's works

The idea behind IncipitSearch

2. Generic approach

Generic search engine for notated music, particularly Plaine & Easie notation
Possibility of Implementation in multiple projects
Connecting repositories of notated music in a metasearch engine
Combining digital with analogue ressources and different source types like editions with collections and more

The idea behind IncipitSearch

3. Why?

Search functionality over different repositories
Possibility to integrate different types and formats
Open API
Open source, published, easy to reimplement

02

Incipits in musicology

What is an incipit?

The beginning or characteristic sequence of a music piece

Identifies multiple music pieces with same title
Simplifies cataloguing music
Gives analytical hints on motifs

“It should contain at least 3 bars or 10 non-repeated notes.”

Plaine & Easie Code Documentation, IAML

Plaine & Easie Code

Standard for encoding music incipits
Proposed by Barry S. Brook and Murray Gould in 1964
Notation with typewriter characters
Maintained by IAML and the RISM
P&E Documentation

P&E Example

P&E

%G-2$bB@3/8 8AAA/6.''C3'B4G/8GGG/6.B3A4F/

03

The webapplication IncipitSearch

Functionality of IncipitSearch

https://incipitsearch.adwmainz.net

Architecture and components

04

Integrated data

Preliminary considerations

What kind of music repositories can be integrated?
What kind of annotations are used?
Which content is openly available?
Which overall (metadata) standard to use for IncipitSearch?

Music Annotation

Standards and formats for encoding of incipits

Plaine & Easie Code
Humdrum
relative music notation (Parsons Code)
MEI

```
<incipCode>
```
"Incipit coded in a non-XML, plain text format, such as Plaine & Easie Code."
@form Allowed values:
- "plaineAndEasie" (Plaine & Easie Code.)
- "humdrumKern" (Humdrum Kern format.)
- "parsons" (Parsons code.)

General standards

marcXML
RDF

Plaine & Easie as main standard:
⇒ Rich information, frequently in use, different ways to embed

Different types of repositories

Digital repositories:

Library catalogues
Specific collections
Digital editions

Italian National Library

Scans or analogue:

digitized music pieces
analogue only catalogues

Breitkopf: Catalogo delle Sinfonie 1762

IncipitSearch metadata format

preliminary thoughts and goals
- easy possibility to notate incipits for new content
- addition to existing Markup
- applicable on different types of repositories
RDF
- flexible and interoperable through different serializations
- can be added to existing markup with JSON-LD, HTML Microdata, RDFa
- standalone notation (Turtle)