August 16, 2023
Measuring Polyphony
Measuring Polyphony is an ongoing project by researchers at Brandeis University and McGill University to digitally transcribe and notate polyphonic musical texts from manuscripts of the 13th and 14th centuries. As of 2020, the project presents around fifty musical pieces and has plans for growth. Currently, most of the transcribed musical texts are in Latin or French. Each entry presents musical texts in medieval mensural and modern notations. For some entries, the project presents manuscript images in IIIF format to compare against the marked-up scores. Pieces also include audio recordings of their performance in addition to downloadable data for each piece in MEI and PDF format. Measuring Polyphony is committed to open-source data and has made the encoding process clear. The project also makes available all of its data in XML and MEI format and also provides access to its software apparatus on GitHub.