The Optical Neume Recognition Project Dr. Jennifer Bain (Dalhousie University); Dr. Inga Behrendt (Universität Tübingen); Dr. Ichiro Fujinaga (McGill University); Dr. Kate Helsen (Western University); Alan Sexton (University of Birmingham)

http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~aps/research/projects/neumes/

Image Processing Binarization Neume Identification

Neume Categorization

Neume Isolation

Neume Editor (Musical Encoding Initiative)

This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

The Project:

• Development of software to elicit musical directives from graphic symbols (neumes) found in the earliest Western musical notation (1000+ C.E.)

• Manuscripts contain 100,000 to 250,000 recurrences of approximately 20+ discrete neume types

This software will help musicologists: • compare scribal traditions • isolate differences in chant melodies • determine meaning and use for every neume • answer questions about neume / text relationship • understand more about the scribal process

We are also grateful for the work done by Tim Wilfong, Wei Gao, and others at Distributed Digital Music Archives and Libraries Laboratory.