In addition to formal links with institutions and individuals, DIAMM has been fortunate to collaborate with research projects requiring our expertise. Links to some current collaborative efforts may be found below.
The Alamire Foundation (Leuven) funded by the Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie
In October 2011, The Alamire Foundation was awarded funds to follow an ambitious programme of digitization and technical activity over three years, to create a permanent resource celebrating the work of the scriptorium of Petrus Alamire. Included was funding to provide DIAMM project mangement and photography to support these activities.
Cantum pulcriorem invenire, University of Southampton, director Prof. Mark Everist
Musical Life of the late Middle Ages in the Austrian Region (1340-1520), Institut für Musikwissenschaft, Universität Wien, director Prof. dr. Birgit Lodes
The Production and Reading of Music Sources (PRoMS), University of Manchester, director Prof. Thomas Schmidt.
This AHRC-funded project, a collaboration between Manchester University, the Warburg Institute (School of Advanced Studies, University of London) and the Department of Digital Humanities (King’s College London) presents the first integrated resource for the study of the production and reading of polyphonic music sources from the period c.1480 to c. 1530 in a European context. This will be achieved through a systematic analysis and description of the mise-en-page: the ways in which verbal text, musical notation and other graphic devices interact on the pages of manuscripts and printed editions of that time.
Wode partbooks project, University of Edinburgh, director Prof. Jane Dawson
Collaborative project with Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Würzburg University, Germany, supervised by David Catalunya.
Musical scores are a central resource for music research. SIMSSA targets digitized (scanned) music scores as part of a larger program, the Networked Environment for Music Analysis, to design a 21st-century infrastructure for analyzing all types of music media. There are two major obstacles to the use of online musical scores. An unprecedented number of musical scores are available on the Internet: all across the world libraries, archives, and museums are digitizing their print and manuscript books and scores. No standards exist currently, however, to unify these collections so that digital scores can be found in one place. It is also virtually impossible to perform content-based searches of online scores (in contrast with digitized text). There is simply no reliable optical music recognition (OMR) software comparable to the optical character recognition (OCR) software that institutions use to make text collections searchable.
In order to gather scores in one place we will develop ways to locate the music scores found inside digitized books (Google Books, Internet Archive, etc.). We will then index the information centrally at our website so that in the future, each digital object will be easily locatable. In other words, we will be creating a union catalogue of digitized scores.
In order to make the scores searchable, the images must be processed further using OMR. We will deploy two state-of-the-art OMR technologies currently under development. We are particularly committed to providing OMR solutions for older music notation systems. Searchable musical scores will enable us to ask new questions about music, and provide better answers to old ones. Now is the moment to create a new research environment and a new set of research tools.