Historical musical pieces make their way to us through multiple documents and it often happens that multiple sources introduce differences and variants in the music.

meiView is an experimental web application designed to display 15–16th century music and provide a dynamic mechanism for the user to select which variant they want to see.

The application currently is in a demonstration phase, displaying a fragment of a choral piece by the late 15th-century Franco-Flemish composer Henricus Isaac (edited by David Lee). The purpose of this demonstration is to showcase one possible mechanism for critical editions in a digital and dynamic environment.

User Guide

Click on the green dots to see the differences between the sources! In the sidebar you can see the highlighted sources and variants you have selected. When you select a variant, the score automatically updates so that the selected variant is included.

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How it's done

The software is written entirely in JavaScript and based on two open source projects, MEI-to-VexFlow and VexFlow.

MEI-to-VexFlow is a JavaScript library which provides a function for converting MEI-encoded music notation into drawing instructions for the VexFlow music notation rendering library. VexFlow is a JavaScript library to render music notation in HTML5.

The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven effort to create a commonly-accepted, digital, symbolic representation of music notation documents.

For more details about the recent development in MEI-to-VexFlow visit the following blog posts at the Maryland Institute for Technologies in the Humanities:

Acknowledgements

The development of the application wouldn’t have been possible without the financial support of the Google Summer of Code programme and the University of Maryland that hosted the MEI2VexFlow project.

Leave feedback!

We would be happy to hear back from musicians, music scholars and generally anyone who has comments, questions, opinion, suggestions or want to share anything else related to the project! If you have anything to say please drop us an email at meiview.contact@gmail.com
meiView is an open source software licensed under Apache 2.0. See the source code on
Github