Editors’ Choice: Displaying Music Notation of Multiple Sources With MEI-to-VexFlow

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is over, and it’s time to recap what has been done during a greatly productive summer. Not only has my project has achieved its main objectives, but as a result I was able to demonstrate the results at the École Thématique, Centre d’Étude Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France in late October.

Historical musical pieces make their way to us through multiple documents and it often happens that multiple sources introduce differences and variants in the music. As the final task of the GSoC project, I designed a sample web application called meiView that is be able to display 15–16th century music (more precisely, the transcription of such music into common western music notation), and provide a dynamic mechanism for the user to select which variant they want to see.

To see it working, open meiView, and click on the green dots to see the differences between the sources. In the sidebar you can see the highlighted sources and variants you have selected. When you select a variant, the score automatically updates so that the selected variant is displayed.

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This content was selected for Digital Humanities Now by Editor-in-Chief Sasha Hoffman based on nominations by Editors-at-Large: Amy Ratelle, Anne McGrail, Anu Paul, Christina Boyles, Sarah Canfield Fuller, Silvia Stoyanova, and Subhasis Chattopadhyay