A Morphology of Medieval Notations in the Optical Neume Recognition Project

A Morphology of Medieval Notations in the Optical Neume Recognition Project

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The SENNA LEAVES study of medieval notations depends on effective categorization of individual signs in order to facilitate a comprehensive understanding of their musical meaning.Over the past century, chant scholars have developed several kinds of neume tables which arrange and contextualize neumes either according to graphical type, chronology, or scribal tradition.Some neume tables contain longer strings of neumes that link certain notation conventions with performance traditions.

The course of neume table development reads like a history of the study of early notations, itself, and reveals the evolving interests and pursuits of the scholars who created them.It also sets the stage for the latest use of the neume table as a reference for document analysis software applied to digital images of medieval manuscripts.Now, instead of presenting a static list of discrete signs, the neume table can be understood as a reflection of the notational variety and nuance of the hundreds of thousands of neumes contained in every book of liturgical chant.

On this scale, neume tables help scholars to understand the use of medieval neumes in the same way a linguist understands the morphology of words.This article presents the principles on which this new kind of neume table has been developed and suggests the ways in which this new way of thinking might 5-HTP 50MG inform the discipline in the future.