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mei-analyser is a search and cross-comparison tool for MEI-encoded music chants from the Portuguese Early Music (PEM) database. It is a part of the ECHOES from The Past project.
A guide to the development can be found in Developer - General Guide. If you wish to use your .mei files, you can follow this guide here
From the website, users can see and access the search panel on the left side of the screen.
The search panel allows several search options for musicologists to filter chants by their properties and marking certain features (through the use of highlighted text, or different font colours and underlines). These options of filters and markings are detailed below:
Highlight melismas: Highlight the syllables with at least xx notes, this allows to distinguish more melismatic passages from those more syllabic. The filter to highlight melismas can go from two notes per syllable to twenty notes per syllable
The syllables that have ornamental neumes are always shown in a different font color and underline: blue with single solid underline for liquescent, mustard with wavy underline for quilisma, and dark magenta with dashed underline for oriscus.
Filter chants by its music script, being Aquitanian and/or Square
Filter chants by their detected mode. The heuristics to compute the mode based on the chants notes are explained on their own pages: see the mode detection for Aquitanian script and the mode detection for Square script pages. Mode undetected chants can also be displayed when Undetected is selected.
Filter chants by the presence of the ornamental shapes of liquescent, quilisma, and oriscus when their corresponding checkboxes are selected. For example, if the liquescent checkbox is selected, it will show all chants that contain liquescent (they could also contain the other two ornamental shapes of not, but the chants that are missing liquescent will be filtered out). Also, if the three checkboxes are selected, the results will show the chants that have all three liquescent, quilisma, and oriscus shapes. On the other hand, if no option is selected, all chants will be shown. Regardless of the selected checkbox, the syllables that have ornamental neumes are always shown in a different font color and underline: blue with single solid underline for liquescent, mustard with wavy underline for quilisma, and dark magenta with dashed underline for oriscus.
Melodic Pattern Search. You can search by using a pitch-based sequence (e.g., c e g e) or a contour-based sequence (e.g., +3 +2 -3). See more detail by clicking on the information icon ⓘ.
To perform a search, click on the Search button below the melodic pattern section.
You can search using letters d (down), u (up), and s (same/unison). E.g., u d s would return all results where there's a 3 note pattern the 1st to 2nd note goes up, the second to third note goes down, and the third and fourth note are the same.
For Old Hispanic notation, q (quilisma) and n (null/non existing) can be used.
- n will appear when intm is null (e.g. first nc of a neume because there's no nc to reference for the direction) or not defined
- q will be any nc with a quilisma child (does not have an intm element to reference)
After clicking on the Search button (below the melodic pattern section), the results will appear as a table on the right-side of the screen.
For the example search query above:
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Note that ornamental shape marking will always show on the result table. When an option is selected, the table will show all available chants with the selected ornamental shapes.
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Example with different modes, ornamental neumes, and melodic pattern selected:
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When viewing the result table, user can choose to:
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View image on PEM: See the full image of the chant on the webpage of the Portuguese Early Music (PEM) Database
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Example of a chant when select
Display chant:It shows the metadata at the top (with the exception of the mode, which is computed by the machine as indicated before) and it displayed the encoded chant at the bottom.
