My main projects involve retrieving the semantics of mensural music and present them in score layout (either by developing tools to achieve this task or using them to encode a new corpus). Most mensural pieces are written in separate parts rather than in score format. The separate-parts arrangement difficults the visualization of the vertial sonorities (one cannot visualize what notes are being sung at the same time) and relation between the voices. Most of my projects involve the conversion of this separate-parts layout of the original pieces into a score layout. This, implies dealing with the interpretation of the duration of the notes in mensural notation, which is an issue on its own (in triple meter, the duration of the mensural notes depends on the context—notes preceding/following). Therefore, retrieving the semantics of mensural notation is an integral part of presenting the mensural piece in score layout.
“Digital Infrastructures for Mensural Music Using MEI.” Invited lecture for the Kolloquium Musikwissenschaft, Freiburger Forschungs- und Lehrzentrum Musik (FZM), Freiburg, Germany. January 26th, 2021.
“MEI for Encoding Mensural Music – A Survey.” Invited lecture for the Digital Humanities in Early Music Research I Series – Session II: Early Music Databases and Encoding, Prague (online). June 22nd, 2020.
Another big topic I have been working on recently is about digitization, encoding, and analysis of chants.
The following entries organize my publications and talks according to their topics, and these are separated into two main sections.
For more information about this project (including videos of the do-it-yourself book scanner) and the paper with the images in full color, see Guatemalan Digitization Project.
“Digital Images and Symbolic Corpus of Sacred Polyphonic Music in Guatemala and their Retrieval Process.” Presented at the Digital Technologies Applied to Music Research Conference: Methodologies, Projects and Challenges, Lisbon, Portugal. June 28th, 2024. (Refereed) slides
“From Manuscript to Pixel. Tips for a Digitizing Campaign and for Handling Endangered Sources.” Invited lecture presented with Zuelma Chaves and Carla Crespo at the Research Seminar Series “Musicologists and Their Sources: The Alchemy of Turning Parchment into Pixels” (being part of the COST Action Early Muse), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. June 22nd, 2024. slides
“Updates and Outcomes from the Guatemalan Digitization and Encoding Project.” Presented at the Music Encoding and Text Encoding Initiative Joint Conference, Paderborn, Germany. September 8th, 2023. (Refereed) slides
“Counterpoint Error-Detection Tools for Optical Music Recognition of Renaissance Polyphonic Music.” Presented at the International Society of Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR), Bengaluru, India. December 6th, 2022. (Refereed) slides
“Music Encoding for Research, Pedagogy, and Discovery - Guatemalan Cathedral Choirbooks: From Manuscripts to Digital Images to Symbolic Editorial Scores.” Presented at the American Musicological Society (AMS) / Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) / Society for Music Theory (SMT) Joint Meeting, New Orleans, LA. November 11th, 2022. (Refereed) slides
“Guatemalan Cathedral Choirbooks: Automatic Transcription of Mensural Sources for Their Preservation, Access, and Study.” Presented at the International Musicological Society Congress, Athens, Greece. August 24th, 2022. (Refereed)
“Digitization of Choirbooks in Guatemala.” Presented at the Digital Libraries for Musicology, Prague, Czech Republic. July 27th, 2022. (Refereed)
“Guatemalan Cathedral Choirbook 1: From Manuscript to Digital Images to Digital Scores.” Presented at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Lisbon, Portugal (Online). July 6th, 2021. (Refereed)
“Digitization and Encoding of the Musical Contents of a Set of Guatemalan Choirbooks.” Invited lecture for Multimedia Systems (GLIS 633) course, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. November 27th, 2019.
“OMR for Mensural Notation: Looking at a Guatemalan Music Manuscript.” Presented at the SIMSSA Workshop XIX, CIRMMT, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. September 21st, 2019. slides
“Taking Digital Humanities to Guatemala, a Case Study in the Preservation of Colonial Musical Heritage.” Presented at the Digital Humanities Conference, Tivoli Vredenburg, Utrecht, The Netherlands. July 10th, 2019. (Refereed) slides
“Guatemalan Manuscripts: Digitization Issues and Future Challenges in the Adaption of the OMR Workflow for Mensural Music.” Presented at the SIMSSA Workshop XVIII, Department of Musicology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. June 2nd, 2019. slides
“Application of Music-Encoding Technologies to Guatemalan Choirbooks, Facilitating Preservation and Musicological Studies of the Colonial Repertoire.” Presented at the Music Encoding Conference, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria. May 31st, 2019. (Refereed) slides
“Preservation of the Colonial Musical Heritage of Guatemala through Digitization and Music Encoding Technologies.” Presented at the Association of Canadian Archivists McGill Student Chapter’s annual colloquium: Archival Outreach & Hidden Collections, McLennan-Redpath Library Complex, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. March 18th, 2019. (Refereed)
“Guatemalan Manuscript Digitization Project.” Presented at the SIMSSA Workshop XVII: Infrastructure for Music Discovery, CIRMMT, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. December 1st, 2018. slides
Different slide presentations focus on different aspects of the project. Some talks were more focused towards archives and libraries, others towards technologies, others towards future work. This set of slides contains everything that has been presented on the ‘Guatemalan Digitization’ topic.
Notes:
Thomae, Martha E., Julie E. Cumming, and Ichiro Fujinaga. “Counterpoint Error-Detection Tools for Optical Music Recognition of Renaissance Polyphonic Music.” In Proceedings of the 23rd International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference. Bengaluru, India, 2022. https://archives.ismir.net/ismir2022/paper/000060.pdf. PDF
Thomae, Martha E., Julie E. Cumming, and Ichiro Fujinaga. “Digitization of Choirbooks in Guatemala.” In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicologists, 19–26. Prague, Czech Republic: ACM, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1145/3543882.3543885. PDF
Thomae, Martha E. “The Guatemalan Choirbooks: Facilitating Preservation, Performance, and Study of the Colonial Repertoire.” In Christian Sacred Music in the Americas, edited by Andrew Shenton and Joanna Smolko. New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. PDF (as published in B&W)
Vocal polyphonic music from 1280 to 1600 is written in mensural notation and it is typically presented in a layout with separate parts.The Mensural Scoring-up Tool is a set of Python scripts designed to automatically transform the separate-parts representation of the music into a score by dealing with the context-dependent nature of the notation through the implementation of the principles of imperfection and alteration, outlined by Franco of Cologne (ca. 1280). This tool exhibits 97% accuracy in a corpus of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century pieces, including both black and white mensural notation.
“The Mensural Scoring-up Tool.” Presented at the Digital Libraries for Musicology, National Library of The Netherlands, The Hague, The Netherlands. November 9th, 2019. (Refereed) slides
“Automatic Scoring up of Parts in Mensural Notation.” Presented at the Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland. July 6th, 2018. (Refereed) slides
“Automatic Scoring up of Music in Mensural Notation.” Presented at the Music Encoding Conference, Maryland University, College Park, Maryland, MD. May 23rd, 2018. (Refereed) slides
“Automatic Scoring up of Mensural Parts.” Presented at the Digital Musicology Workshop, CIRMMT, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. April 27th, 2018. slides
“Automatic Scoring-up Tool for Mensural Music.” Presented at the SIMSSA Workshop XII, CIRMMT, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. August 7th, 2017. slides
Thomae, Martha E., Julie E. Cumming, and Ichiro Fujinaga. “The Mensural Scoring-Up Tool.” In Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Digital Libraries for Musicology, 9–19. National Library of the Netherlands, The Hague, NL: ACM, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1145/3358664.3358668. PDF
An online mensural notation editor. My contribution to this editor was the scoring-up functionality (see previous project). This implied converting my Python script into JavaScript, and introducing functionality to deal with older mensural repertoire (Ars antiqua) among other things.
Desmond, Karen, Laurent Pugin, Juliette Regimbal, David Rizo, Craig Sapp, and Martha E. Thomae. “Encoding Polyphony from Medieval Manuscripts Notated in Mensural Notation.” In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, edited by Stefan Münnich and David Rizo, 197–219. Alicante, Spain (online): Humanities Commons, 2021. https://doi.org/10.17613/tf2j-x697. PDF
Desmond, Karen, Andrew Hankinson, Laurent Pugin, Juliette Regimbal, Craig Sapp, and Martha E. Thomae. “Next Steps for Measuring Polyphony: A Prototype Editor for Encoding Mensural Music.” In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, 121–24. Tufts University, Boston, MA: Humanities Commons, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/5k88-9z02. PDF
Translation of annotated modern transcriptions of mensural pieces back into their original notation.
“A Methodology for Encoding Mensural Music: Introducing the Mensural MEI Translator.” Invited talk at the Music Technology Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. May 22nd, 2017. slides
“A Methodology for Encoding Mensural Music: Introducing the Mensural MEI Translator.” Presented at the Music Encoding Conference, Université de Tours, Tours, France. May 17th, 2017. (Refereed) slides
“Digital Encoding of Mensural Music.” Presented at the SIMSSA Workshop X, CIRMMT, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. September 24th, 2016. slides
Applied machine translation techniques to solve one of the central problems in the field of optical music recognition—extracting the semantics of a sequence of music characters—using the seq2seq model and the attention mechanism from machine translation to address this issue. This initial approach could provide a more generalizable solutions than the current approaches, which involve heuristics and grammars.
Thomae, Martha E., Antonio Ríos-Vila, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza, David Rizo, and José M. Iñesta. “Retrieving Music Semantics from Optical Music Recognition by Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the Music Encoding Conference, 19–24. Tufts University, Boston, MA: Humanities Commons, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/605z-nt78. PDF
“MIR for Early Music Documents: Technologies behind the Semi-Automatic Encoding of Mensural Sources into Symbolic Scores.” Invited lecture presented at the Computational and Digital Approaches to Music Scholarship, University of Würzburg. December 13th, 2023. slides
“OMR and Digital Technologies Applied to Music.” Invited lecture for Paleography course, Centro de Estudos de Sociología e Estética Musical (CESEM), NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal (online). December 2nd, 2021.
Recently, during my postdoctoral research fellowship at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, I have focused my work on chants. I have also joined the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) group, where I collaborate with information about Spanish chantbooks in Guatemala for the Cantorales Project (since 2022). The Cantorales Project team works towards developing a catalogue of Spanish chantbooks outside of Spain.
“Encoding and Analysis of Early Music: Aquitanian and Square Music Scripts.” Presented at the Music Encoding Conference, University of North Texas, Denton, TX (online). May 21st, 2024. (Refereed) slides
“Enhancing Musicological Analysis through Digital Tools.” Presented with Antoine Phan at the Digital Technologies Applied to Music Research Conference: Methodologies, Projects and Challenges, Lisbon, Portugal. June 27th, 2024. (Refereed)
“Cantorales in the Americas & Beyond.” Invited lecture with Virginia Blanton for the Centro de Estudos de Sociologia e Estética Musical (CESEM), Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. February 14th, 2024.
“De Pergaminho a Biblioteca Digital: O Cantochão de Braga e Guimarães como Estudo de Caso.” Presented with Elsa De Luca, Inês Nunes Trindade, and Francesco Orio at the 4º Encontro Nacional de Investigadores IN2PAST, Lisbon, Portugal. February 1st, 2024. (Refereed)
“AMS-IAMSG Lightning Lounge - Cantorales: Spanish Chant Books in the Americas and Beyond.” Presented at the American Musicological Society (AMS) / Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) / Society for Music Theory (SMT) Joint Meeting, New Orleans, LA. November 11th, 2022. (Refereed) slides
“Accidental Discoveries.” Presented at the Digital Analysis of Chant Transmission (DACT) Workshop 7: Cantorales in the Americas and Beyond, Online, March 11th, 2022.
Thomae, Martha E., David Rizo, Eliseo Fuentes-Martínez, Cristina Alís Raurich, Elsa De Luca, and Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza. “A Preliminary Proposal for a Systematic GABC Encoding of Gregorian Chant.” In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference of Digital Libraries for Musicology, 45–53. Stellenbosch, South Africa: ACM, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1145/3660570.3660581. PDF