Center “Music – Edition – Media”

The project „Zentrum Musik – Edition – Medien“ which is initally funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), combines experience, concepts, and methods of musicology, several fields of computer science (Contextual Informatics, Human-Computer Interaction, Music and Film Informatics, as well as Software Engineering), and media sciences (media education, empirical media research, media economy, and media management). The focus of this project’s research activities lies on musical and non-textual objects in the scope of digital music editions.

Meico is a converter framework for MEI files. It currently implements MSM (Musical Sequence Markup) and MIDI export plus several convenience functions for MEI processing. It can be used as a Java programming library and standalone application as a command line tool as well as with a graphical user interface.

The alignment of digital scores to audio and video content opens up new possibilities for visualisation and interaction with music. ScoreTube is a viewer/player, that automatically aligns YouTube videos and symbolic scores while providing a simple interface for skipping through the music.

The process of creating historical-critical digital music editions involves the annotation of musical measures in the source materials (e.g. autographs, manuscripts or prints). This serves to chart the sources and create concordances between them. So far, this laborious task is barely supported by software tools. We address this shortcoming with Vertaktoid, a multi-touch and pen interface where the focus is on quick and easy measure annotation.

The Measure Detector marks the first fully AI-based approach for optical measure detection in both typeset and handwritten scores. Providing plain score image files, the framework returns a valid MEI file containing bounding boxes for the detected measures.