Participants may join each session in-person or online, except where noted otherwise. Times are given in local conference time (BST).
Program Overview:| June 02, 2025: Open Workshop |
| June 03, 2025: Workshops |
| June 04, 2025: Conference Day 1 |
| June 05, 2025: Conference Day 2 |
| June 06, 2025: Unconference Day |
This workshop is an open workshop. The goal of the LinkedMusic Partnership is to link music databases through metadata schemas: structures for organizing information stored in a database. This will go a long way towards bringing online music search to the same level of sophistication currently possible for text-based resources, allowing us to answer fundamental questions about music and how it interacts with human creativity, society, culture, and history. For more information, click here.
Presenter(s): Martha E. Thomae1, Perry Roland2, Johannes Kepper3
This workshop is intended for individuals with some knowledge of MEI who want to learn how to work with XML markup for research and analysis. It provides a hands-on introduction to XPath, a powerful query language for XML documents, and XSLT, a language for transforming XML data. By engaging with XSLT's functional programming approach, participants will explore ways to articulate and investigate research questions rooted in an XML-based document model. The emphasis of our workshop is extracting data (or metadata) from MEI documents for analysis. Markup in documents supplies structures and contexts that are especially useful for processing data beyond what we can do with "plain text." Most of the workshop will focus on learning basic XPath navigation and some calculation functions. After this, we will show how XPath is applied in XSLT templates to address specific elements that hold data of interest for visualization (e.g., notes) and exemplify some fundamental transformations. We will produce simple structured documents for storing, sharing, and visualising data during the workshop: HTML lists (and tables) and CSV files. We look forward to processing some participant-supplied MEI before, during, and after the workshop. We will carefully document the XSLT we supply during the workshop to help participants revise and adapt the code to their projects.
1: NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal; 2: University of Virginia, USA; 3: Paderborn University, Germany
Presenter(s): Martha E. Thomae1, Perry Roland2, Johannes Kepper3
This workshop is intended for individuals with some knowledge of MEI who want to learn how to work with XML markup for research and analysis. It provides a hands-on introduction to XPath, a powerful query language for XML documents, and XSLT, a language for transforming XML data. By engaging with XSLT's functional programming approach, participants will explore ways to articulate and investigate research questions rooted in an XML-based document model. The emphasis of our workshop is extracting data (or metadata) from MEI documents for analysis. Markup in documents supplies structures and contexts that are especially useful for processing data beyond what we can do with "plain text." Most of the workshop will focus on learning basic XPath navigation and some calculation functions. After this, we will show how XPath is applied in XSLT templates to address specific elements that hold data of interest for visualization (e.g., notes) and exemplify some fundamental transformations. We will produce simple structured documents for storing, sharing, and visualising data during the workshop: HTML lists (and tables) and CSV files. We look forward to processing some participant-supplied MEI before, during, and after the workshop. We will carefully document the XSLT we supply during the workshop to help participants revise and adapt the code to their projects.
1: NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal; 2: University of Virginia, USA; 3: Paderborn University, Germany
Presenter(s): Martha E. Thomae1, Perry Roland2, Johannes Kepper3
This workshop is intended for individuals with some knowledge of MEI who want to learn how to work with XML markup for research and analysis. It provides a hands-on introduction to XPath, a powerful query language for XML documents, and XSLT, a language for transforming XML data. By engaging with XSLT's functional programming approach, participants will explore ways to articulate and investigate research questions rooted in an XML-based document model. The emphasis of our workshop is extracting data (or metadata) from MEI documents for analysis. Markup in documents supplies structures and contexts that are especially useful for processing data beyond what we can do with "plain text." Most of the workshop will focus on learning basic XPath navigation and some calculation functions. After this, we will show how XPath is applied in XSLT templates to address specific elements that hold data of interest for visualization (e.g., notes) and exemplify some fundamental transformations. We will produce simple structured documents for storing, sharing, and visualising data during the workshop: HTML lists (and tables) and CSV files. We look forward to processing some participant-supplied MEI before, during, and after the workshop. We will carefully document the XSLT we supply during the workshop to help participants revise and adapt the code to their projects.
1: NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal; 2: University of Virginia, USA; 3: Paderborn University, Germany
Presenter(s): Kevin R. Page1, Laurent Pugin2, David M Weigl3, David Lewis1
This half-day workshop will address annotations of musical scores, considering their role and structure, and strategies for representing, encoding and visualising them. The workshop will combine presentations, discussion and hands-on activities with new versions of Verovio and mei-friend. Annotation is an activity common across many walks of life and, for music, it unites scholars, musicians, teachers and composers. The practice is extremely varied, both in the forms it takes and the purposes it serves, and it is used for both physical and digital material. Digital annotations refer to highlights, circles, references, links or other selections made on digital documents or media. User-generated annotations are increasingly seen as a key mechanism for the use and reuse of digital materials across a wide range of applications, while also enhancing the findability and accessibility of that media through its annotations. While the importance of annotations in music notation is generally acknowledged, there is less of a consensus on how best to integrate them into interoperable software applications. Annotations for music can encompass the association of textual observations with regions of a work; cross-reference between musical passages or from a musical passage to some other, non-musical, material; or they might include categorical or structured music-analytical annotations, such as metrical or harmonic labels; most commonly, perhaps, they are used by musicians and teachers for sharing or remembering aspects of musical interpretation. Approaches taken in the digital domain include graphical, drawn overlays on top of an engraved score (which is popular in software for musicians and teachers), the use of URLs to specify score regions to be extracted and drawn by a web service (EMA, used by the CRIM project1), Web Annotations (a Linked Data standard used by the MELD framework2) and the MEI <annot> element itself. Given this diversity, it is essential to align implementation to specific needs and use cases rather than assuming a universal solution. This workshop consolidates a review of existing digital score annotation implementations, presenting new recommendations for enhanced annotation practice in MEI, and with hands-on experiments for implementing these recommendations in Verovio and mei-friend.
1: University of Oxford e-Research Centre, United Kingdom; 2: RISM Digital Centre, Switzerland; 3: University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria
Presenter(s): Martha E. Thomae1, Perry Roland2, Johannes Kepper3
This workshop is intended for individuals with some knowledge of MEI who want to learn how to work with XML markup for research and analysis. It provides a hands-on introduction to XPath, a powerful query language for XML documents, and XSLT, a language for transforming XML data. By engaging with XSLT's functional programming approach, participants will explore ways to articulate and investigate research questions rooted in an XML-based document model. The emphasis of our workshop is extracting data (or metadata) from MEI documents for analysis. Markup in documents supplies structures and contexts that are especially useful for processing data beyond what we can do with "plain text." Most of the workshop will focus on learning basic XPath navigation and some calculation functions. After this, we will show how XPath is applied in XSLT templates to address specific elements that hold data of interest for visualization (e.g., notes) and exemplify some fundamental transformations. We will produce simple structured documents for storing, sharing, and visualising data during the workshop: HTML lists (and tables) and CSV files. We look forward to processing some participant-supplied MEI before, during, and after the workshop. We will carefully document the XSLT we supply during the workshop to help participants revise and adapt the code to their projects.
1: NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal; 2: University of Virginia, USA; 3: Paderborn University, Germany
Presenter(s): Kevin R. Page1, Laurent Pugin2, David M Weigl3, David Lewis1
This half-day workshop will address annotations of musical scores, considering their role and structure, and strategies for representing, encoding and visualising them. The workshop will combine presentations, discussion and hands-on activities with new versions of Verovio and mei-friend.
Annotation is an activity common across many walks of life and, for music, it unites scholars, musicians, teachers and composers. The practice is extremely varied, both in the forms it takes and the purposes it serves, and it is used for both physical and digital material. Digital annotations refer to highlights, circles, references, links or other selections made on digital documents or media. User-generated annotations are increasingly seen as a key mechanism for the use and reuse of digital materials across a wide range of applications, while also enhancing the findability and accessibility of that media through its annotations. While the importance of annotations in music notation is generally acknowledged, there is less of a consensus on how best to integrate them into interoperable software applications. Annotations for music can encompass the association of textual observations with regions of a work; cross-reference between musical passages or from a musical passage to some other, non-musical, material; or they might include categorical or structured music-analytical annotations, such as metrical or harmonic labels; most commonly, perhaps, they are used by musicians and teachers for sharing or remembering aspects of musical interpretation. Approaches taken in the digital domain include graphical, drawn overlays on top of an engraved score (which is popular in software for musicians and teachers), the use of URLs to specify score regions to be extracted and drawn by a web service (EMA, used by the CRIM project1), Web Annotations (a Linked Data standard used by the MELD framework2) and the MEI <annot> element itself. Given this diversity, it is essential to align implementation to specific needs and use cases rather than assuming a universal solution.
This workshop consolidates a review of existing digital score annotation implementations, presenting new recommendations for enhanced annotation practice in MEI, and with hands-on experiments for implementing these recommendations in Verovio and mei-friend.
1: University of Oxford e-Research Centre, United Kingdom; 2: RISM Digital Centre, Switzerland; 3: University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria
Keynote speaker: Anja Volk
In Matt Haigs popular sci-fi novel “How to stop time”, Tom Hazard, currently looking like a 41-year-old, has been playing music for four centuries, being 439 years old due to a rare condition of aging much slower than ordinary people. In attempting to make sense of his 400-years-old existence to find a path forward, he also seeks to make sense of the role of music in his long life.
Becoming a music researcher is often motivated by making sense of music one way or another, though we usually have much less than 400 years of personal experience we can draw upon. With the digital encodings we have at hand now, we process music information that spans way more than 400 years, as demonstrated at this year’s MEC conference, with papers addressing Gregorian tradition, polyphonic lute music, Schubert, Stravinsky, post-tonal music, Klezmer, or electroacoustic and film music. The diversity of research topics addressed, such as the study of melody, musical form, polyphony, repeated structures, performances or visualizations, demonstrate different aspects of our musical scholarship related to de- and encoding of music information. In attempting to make sense of music together, how do we connect these different perspectives on music?
To open a reflection on this question during the conference, I will discuss in my talk examples from 25 years of research at Utrecht University on de- and encoding of music information, connecting musicological inquiries on musical structures with applications of these structures in different interaction contexts. In our case, finding connections between musical structures and interactions is crucial for demonstrating why music research matters within the academic and societal context in which we work. It also became important in our education of students at the intersection of computer science and music, for making sense of music together in the classroom, which brings me back to Tom Hazard.
Tom’s wish to live an ordinary life after 400 years, leads to a decision to become a schoolteacher in contemporary London. When interacting with rather disinterested teenagers, he offers a (sometimes comical) stage for making sense of his long life while educating the next generation. I can relate to this experience. Making sense of music together with students in the classroom has provided a (sometimes comical) learning experience for me that also sharpens my mind on finding connections between different aspects of musical inquiries, and on staying connected to why music matters to us. I will discuss examples from teaching computer science students about the de- and encoding of music information, and from my colleague Peter van Kranenburg’s experience of teaching machine learning to musicology students. In preparing a new inter-faculty course for both student groups, we now seek to find connections for both groups to make sense of music together. This community has given us inspirations for teaching in the past, and I welcome ideas and reflections on making sense of music in the classroom by engaging different aspects of our musical inquiry during MEC2025.
Utrecht University, Netherlands
Presenter(s): Rui Yang1, Mathieu Giraud1, Florence Levé1,2
1: Univ. Lille, CNRS, Centrale Lille, UMR 9189 CRIStAL, F-59000 Lille, France; 2: Université de Picardie Jules Verne, MIS, UR 4290, F-80000 Amiens, France
Presenter(s): Sven Gronemeyer1,2, Marco Dimitriou3, Semih Pelen3
1: Max Weber Foundation - German Humanities Institutes Abroad; 2: La Trobe University, Melbourne; 3: University of Münster
Presenter(s): David Fiala1, Laurent Pugin2, Marnix van Berchum3, Martha Thomae4, Kévin Roger5
1: University of Tours (F); 2: RISM Digital Center, Bern (CH); 3: Huygens Institute for History and Culture of the Netherlands (NL); 4: NOVA University of Lisbon (PT); 5: University of Lorraine (F)
Presenter(s): David Lewis1, Olja Janjuš2, Reinier de Valk3, David M Weigl4, Tim Crawford5, Paul Overell6, Kateryna Schöning3
1: University of Oxford e-Research Centre / Goldsmiths, University of London; 2: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; 3: University of Vienna; 4: mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria; 5: Goldsmiths, University of London; 6: Independent Researcher
Presenter(s): Hizkiel Alemayehu1, Tobias Bachmann1, Nikolaos Beer1, Benjamin Bohl1, Dennis Friedl1, Daniel Röwenstrunk1, Dennis Ried2, Kristin Herold1, Daniel Jettka1, Johannes Kepper1, Silke Reich3, Peter Stadler1
1: Paderborn University, Germany; 2: Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany; 3: Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany
Presenter(s): Patricia García-Iasci1, David Rizo1,2, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza1
1: Universidad de Alicante, Spain; 2: ISEA.CV
Presenter(s): Candida Billie Mantica, Giovanni Meriani
Università di Pavia, Italy
Presenter(s): Stephanie Klauk1, Pascal Schmolenzky1, Christof Weiß2, Rainer Kleinertz1, Meinard Müller3
1: Universität des Saarlandes, Germany; 2: Universität Würzburg; 3: International Audio Laboratories Erlangen
Presenter(s): Jelena Wißmann
Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Presenter(s): Klaus Rettinghaus
Rettinghaus Ltd., Germany
Presenter(s): Adrian Nachtwey1, Fabian C. Moss2
1: Paderborn University, Germany; 2: Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Germany
Presenter(s): Julia Maria Jaklin
Vienna University of Technology, Austria
Presenter(s): Anna Dvořáková, Jan Hajič jr.
Charles University
Presenter(s): Joshua Stutter
University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Presenter(s): Ailin Arjmand1, Reza Seyedi2
1: Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance, France; 2: Tehran University of Art, Iran
Presenter(s): Vojtěch Lanz, Kristína Szabová, Jan Hajič jr.
Charles University, Czech Republic
Presenter(s): Kristina Richts-Matthaei
Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz, Germany
Presenter(s): Silvan David Peter, Patricia Hu, Gerhard Widmer
Johannes Kepler University, Austria
Presenter(s): Joan Cerveto-Serrano1, David Rizo1,2, Jorge Calvo-Zaragoza1
1: University of Alicante; 2: Instituto Superior de Enseñanzas Artísticas de la Comunidad Valenciana
Presenter(s): Sten Lassmann, Maksim Štšura, Aare Tool
Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Estonia
Presenter(s): Egor Polyakov
HMT Leipzig, Germany
Presenter(s): Anders Bonde, David Meredith
Aalborg University, Denmark
Panel speakers: Anna E Kijas1, Jessica Grimmer2, Reba Wissner3, William Robin2
1: Tufts University, United States of America; 2: University of Maryland, United States of America; 3: Columbus State University, United States of America
Presenter(s): Werner Goebl, David M. Weigl
University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Austria
Presenter(s): Joshua Neumann
Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz, Germany
Presenter(s): Florent Jacquemard1, Lydia Rodriguez-de la Nava2
1: Inria, Paris, France; 2: CNAM, Cedric, Paris, France
Presenter(s): Iacopo Cividini, David Herzog, Roland Mair-Gruber, Oleksii Sapov-Erlinger
Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Austria
Presenter(s): Johannes Kepper1, Laurent Pugin2
1: University of Paderborn, Germany; 2: RISM Digital Center, Switzerland
Presenter(s): Clemens Gubsch, Paul Gulewycz, Vasiliki Papadopoulou, Anna Czernin, Peter Provaznik
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
Presenter(s): Jonathan Goya
Case Western Reserve University, United States of America
Presenter(s): Antoine Phan1, Martha E. Thomae2, Elsa De Luca2, Francesco Orio2
1: NOVA University Lisbon; McGill University; 2: NOVA University Lisbon
Presenter(s): Christoph Finkensiep1, Martin Rohrmeier2
1: University of Amsterdam; 2: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Presenter(s): Maik Köster, Johannes Hentschel, Markus Neuwirth
Anton Bruckner Private University, Linz, Austria
Presenter(s): Aaron Einbond
City, University of London, United Kingdom
Presenter(s): Salome Obert1, Agnes Seipelt2, Alessandra Paciotti3, Cecilia Raunisi4, Susanne Cox5
1: Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe, Germany; 2: Beethovens Werkstatt | Universität Paderborn, Germany; 3: Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy; 4: Christian Albrechts Universität zu Kiel, Germany; 5: Beethovens Werkstatt | Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Germany
Presenter(s): Elizabeth Anne Pineo
University of Maryland, United States of America
Presenter(s): Felicitas Stickler, Torsten Roeder, Fabian C. Moss
Universität Würzburg, Germany
Presenter(s): Karen Desmond
National University of Ireland, Maynooth University (NUIM), Ireland
Presenter(s): Silke Reich1, Dennis Friedl2
1: Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany; 2: Paderborn University, Germany
Presenter(s): Tim Crawford
One way or another, I have been involved with ‘music encoding’ for well over 25 years now. It started in 1987 with my first Macintosh computer, on which I played with a program called Hypercard, which you could get to play tunes rather crudely; I was soon exploring how to make it play from lute tablature, for which I needed my own encoding format. Soon after, I met the late Donald Byrd, then working on his music-notation editor, Nightingale, a Macintosh program which never achieved the success it deserved. Don’s colleague, John Gibson, helped me to hack together, using bits of code from Nightingale, my own Tablature Processor for Mac, which soon died owing to my failure to keep up with successive OS upgrades. But I was able to use it in earnest in an exacting project, providing modern tablature for a pair of volumes of my own scholarly edition of the lute music of Silvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750).
Don and I worked on several projects together, including Online Music Recognition and Search (OMRAS), which received joint US/UK funding for three years. It was at the suggestion of our US funders, the NSF Digital Libraries Initiative, that we hold an international workshop, which in fact became the first ISMIR conference (Plymouth, Massachusetts, 2000). Already, with Don and John Gibson, I had contributed a chapter to Beyond MIDI (1999) about the Nightingale Notelist, an ASCII-based encoding format for music which captured many of the features of Nightingale itself. But all was swept aside by the rapid domination of formats based on XML, which itself had only existed for a decade or so at that point. At the second ISMIR (Bloomington, Indiana, 2001), I was witness in a pub to what can best be described as a ‘lively discussion’ between Michael Good, whose MusicXML had just got going, and Perry Roland, about the relative merits of elements and attributes for certain features of music which I don’t need to go into here.
Since the last time I was honoured to give an MEC keynote (at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2014), Perry’s baby, MEI (amusingly, known to my email client as ‘Mei’), has grown up considerably. I shall try to summarise briefly some of the achievements of those here at MEC, and some who can’t be present, to bring this about. There will be many omissions, for which I apologise in advance, as I don’t pretend to keep up to date in every facet of MEI’s development, and there may well be things happening which none of us know about - such is the nature of Open Source. But I hope it will be a non-technical and personal survey showing something of MEI’s current range and scope that was just a dream back in 2014, and certainly undreamt of in 1999.
Goldsmiths University of London