Martha E. Thomae

I am a postdoctoral research fellow for the ECHOES project at the NOVA University of Lisbon, where I lead the development of tools to facilitate the search and analysis of chants encoded in the MEI music format. I have a PhD and Master’s in Music Technology from McGill University, where I worked under the supervision of Ichiro Fujinaga and Julie Cumming, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Universidad del Valle de Guatemala. During my PhD and Master’s studies, I worked as a research assistant for the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis (SIMSSA) project at the Distributed Digital Musical Archives and Libraries (DDMAL) Lab, directed by Ichiro Fujinaga, at McGill. I also was a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT) and served as student coordinator of the Music Information Research axis of CIRMMT from 2017–2019. Most of my research has focused on the preservation and encoding of mensural music. I have developed tools to facilitate the encoding of this repertoire, including the Mensural MEI Translator and the Automatic Scoring-up Tool, which I later integrated into the Measuring Polyphony Editor (an online editor for mensural notation). My PhD dissertation focused on digitizing and encoding Guatemalan polyphonic choirbooks from the colonial period, written in mensural notation, using optical music recognition, automatic voice alignment, and computational error detection. For more details, visit the Guatemalan Digitization Project page. This research is funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FRQSC). I am an active member of the Mensural MEI Interest Group (IG), where we look into the best options for encoding the various features of mensural notation to represent the characteristics of the vocal polyphonic music from the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. I served as Co-Chair of the Mensural MEI IG (2020–2021) and member of the MEI Board (2020–2022).