The NEUMES Project: digital transcription of medieval chant manuscripts

This paper introduces the NEUMES Project from a top-down perspective. The purpose of the project is to design a software infrastructure for digital transcription of medieval chant manuscripts, such that transcriptions can be interoperable across many types of applications programs. Existing software for modern music does not provide an effective solution. A distributed library of chant document resources for the Web is proposed, to encompass photographic images, transcriptions, and searchable databases of manuscript descriptions. The NEUMES encoding scheme for chant transcription is presented, with NeumesXML serving as a ´wrapper´ for transmission, storage, and editorial markup of transcription data. A scenario of use is given and future directions for the project are briefly discussed.