Lecture by Martha Thomae (EMS) at Latin American Music Information Retrieval (LAMIR)

In the lecture ‘Digital Images and Symbolic Encoding of Guatemalan Polyphonic Choirbooks: Enhancing Preservation and Access for Early Music Sources through Digitisation and Music Information Retrieval’, Martha E. Thomae (Early Music Studies Group) presented a pilot project focused on the digitization and encoding of one of six colonial polyphonic choirbooks from the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala (AHAG), an archive located next to the Metropolitan Cathedral in Guatemala City. The lecture occurred at the 1st Latin American Music Information Retrieval (LAMIR) workshop, in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), between 9 and 11 December.

These choirbooks, copied in the 17th and 18th centuries, primarily contain Renaissance European polyphonic music written in mensural notation and provide invaluable insight into Guatemala’s colonial-era musical heritage. To preserve and enhance access to this music, Martha E. Thomae employed a do-it-yourself (DIY) book scanner for high-resolution images, optical music recognition (OMR) software trained for handwritten mensural notation, and an interpreter for mensural notation. Additionally, a music-analysis tool served as an error checker.

Martha E. Thomae presented these tools and their integration into a digitization and music information retrieval (MIR) pipeline to create both digital images and symbolic scores of the choirbook. The symbolic scores are encoded in MEI format, a machine-readable standard that allows for the representation of early music in its original notation. This MIR pipeline can be used to semi-automatically encode other early music sources in mensural notation from both Europe and Latin America.

By relying on open, free, and online technologies, this pipeline remains accessible to projects with limited resources, furthering the project’s mission of “enhancing access” to early music sources.